Definition
A failure in the RAG retrieval stage where relevant documents are present in the candidate set but are assigned lower priority scores than irrelevant ones, often leading to the 'Lost-in-the-Middle' effect. While improving ranking via Cross-Encoders minimizes this error, it introduces a trade-off of significantly higher inference latency compared to initial vector similarity searches.
Distinguished from 'Recall Error' where the correct information is missing from the retrieved set entirely.
"A librarian finding the exact book you need but placing it at the very bottom of a heavy stack of 50 unrelated magazines."
- Precision@K(Evaluation Metric)
- Cross-Encoder(Mitigation Component)
- Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF)(Algorithmic Mitigation)
- NDCG (Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain)(Measurement Metric)
Conceptual Overview
A failure in the RAG retrieval stage where relevant documents are present in the candidate set but are assigned lower priority scores than irrelevant ones, often leading to the 'Lost-in-the-Middle' effect. While improving ranking via Cross-Encoders minimizes this error, it introduces a trade-off of significantly higher inference latency compared to initial vector similarity searches.
Disambiguation
Distinguished from 'Recall Error' where the correct information is missing from the retrieved set entirely.
Visual Analog
A librarian finding the exact book you need but placing it at the very bottom of a heavy stack of 50 unrelated magazines.