Three runs, one boundary
What reranking can and cannot do
A reranker reorders a list someone else built. That single fact decides which problems it can touch and which it cannot, and it is the difference between a week well spent and a week spent swapping models that could never have helped. These three posts find the boundary, then find out why the reranker inside it was failing anyway.
2 posts
- 1Retrieval9 min
Reranking cannot find what retrieval missed
I swapped four rerankers and watched Pass@1 climb while recall sat at exactly 47.6% every single time.
- 2Retrieval10 min
Your reranker speaks English. Your tickets do not.
Turning on the default reranker made search worse. The model name had a two-letter suffix I had never looked at.