Re-ranking and Late Interaction Drive Retrieval Quality: A Controlled Comparison of RAG Strategies for Scientific Question Answering

Bhagyesh Rathi, Eshan Chawla, William B. Andreopoulos

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is now the standard way to ground Large Language Models (LLMs) in external knowledge, yet the design space of retrieval pipelines is large and…