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Weekend Challenge · Week 4

Beat the Baseline

This week has a hard, numeric win condition: your hybrid pipeline must beat BOTH pure BM25 and pure vector search on your own metrics. No participation trophies.

Your mission

  1. Assemble hybrid retrieval with RRF; measure it
  2. Add cross-encoder reranking; measure the lift separately
  3. If hybrid does NOT beat both parents, diagnose why and fix it — that's the real exercise
Deliverable

A staged results table (BM25 / vector / hybrid / hybrid+rerank) with your analysis, committed.

Stretch goal

Sweep the RRF k parameter and the rerank depth (top-10/20/50). Chart quality vs. latency and pick your production operating point.