Tagged “reranking”
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When a reranker earns its latency
A cross-encoder reads the query and passage together, which is why it ranks better and costs more. Where it belongs, what to feed it, and when to skip it.
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A reranker cannot find what retrieval missed
Reranking reorders a candidate set and never adds to it. Why a good reranker on a shallow pipeline is money spent on the wrong stage.
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Using an LLM as a reranker
Asking a general model to order candidates needs no training data and brings non-determinism, position bias and per-query cost. When that trade works.