Why it matters

Reranking improves precision. Standard for high-quality RAG.

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The architecture

Retrieve top-50.

Cross-encoder scores each.

Take top-5 for generation.

Reranking pipelineRetrieve top-50cheap first passCross-encoder rerankprecise scoringTop-5 to LLMfor generationCross-encoder: e.g., BGE-reranker, Cohere Rerank, ColBERT
Reranking.
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How it works end to end

Retrieve broadly.

Rerank with quality model.

Cross-encoder: BGE-reranker-large, Cohere Rerank v3.

Latency: rerank adds ~100ms.