[kacperlukawski]

The cross-encoder will only rerank the results, that's right. And you're also correct that if the initial search returns 100 garbage results, it won't be able to help. But that's true for any reranking method. Even the rank fusion you use will rerank only the results returned by keyword and vector search. So what is the advantage of it over cross-encoders?

[trengrj]

Adding a cross-encoder to your app means including pytorch/transformers and a model as a dependency. For people using OpenAI or Cohere embedding apis and lightweight infrastructure this can be a big pain.

[generall]

Proposed architecture doesn't limit you to use self-hosted transformers only, you can use OpenAI just as easily. And you don't need a to install a "module" for that