Why Rerank Is Essential: From 100 Retrieved Docs to the 5 Correct Answers in RAG
Even with a perfectly populated vector database, a RAG pipeline often returns irrelevant answers because the initial Bi‑encoder retrieval only narrows the pool to about 100 candidates, and without a Cross‑encoder rerank step the truly correct document—often buried around rank 37—never reaches the LLM for answering.
