Quiz

2988 questions of the kind that actually get asked — in interviews, in architecture review boards, and by the person who has to run the thing at 3 AM. Every answer states the trade-off rather than the slogan, and says when the obvious choice is the wrong one.

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3 questions in Reranking.

Quiz

A retrieval system's first-stage results are mediocre. Is reranking the right investment, and what does it cost?

A support assistant adds a cross-encoder reranker. Offline NDCG at 10 rises from 0.61 to 0.74 and it ships. Two weeks later, answers drawn from long runbook pages are worse than they were before reranking, while short FAQ answers improved. Nothing errors and no alert fires. What happened?

Retrieval returns 100 candidates and a cross-encoder reranks all of them. The service must hold 300 queries per second at a 400 ms p95 budget for the whole retrieval stage. Roughly what does that rerank cost in hardware and time and does it change the design?