Skip to main content
ADVANCED-RAG5 MIN READ

Implement Hybrid Retrieval with RRF

Apply Reciprocal Rank Fusion to combine lexical and dense retrieval candidates in a RAG pipeline.

BM25 and dense retrieval each find useful support-ticket documents, but raw score averaging ranks a generic article above the exact error-code runbook. RRF hybrid retrieval: retrieve separately, fuse ranks, then rerank or assemble context The common trap is treating every numeric retrieval score as comparable. A BM25 score and a cosine similarity score do not represent the same evidence scale. Retrieve separately Run BM25 top 20 and dense top 20 for the same user question, preserving rank positions and document IDs. Separate runs keep each signal visible. You can inspect whether exact and semantic evidence are both contributing. Compute RRF…

Read the full lesson

Sign up free — one personalized lesson every day, matched to your role and goals.

Already have an account? Sign in

← Back to library
Contact us