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Vector Search

Embeddings & Retrieval Tuning

Improve retrieval quality: embedding choice, normalization, reranking, chunking, and recall-latency tradeoffs.

1. Why should the same embedding model be used for both indexing documents and encoding queries?

2. What does a cross-encoder reranker do that a bi-encoder retriever does not?

3. Why is vector normalization relevant when using cosine similarity?

4. How does increasing HNSW's 'ef_search' parameter affect retrieval?

5. What retrieval problem does adding chunk overlap primarily mitigate?

6. Why can a domain-specific fine-tuned embedding model outperform a general one for retrieval?

7. What is the main tradeoff when reducing embedding dimensionality (e.g., via Matryoshka truncation)?