Your reranking team says retrieval-stage metrics don’t...

The reranker’s effectiveness is bounded by the initial retrieval stage. If the retrieval system fails to include the ground-truth document within its top k’ results, the reranker has no opportunity to promote that document, rendering the reranker’s sophistication irrelevant. Conversely, the generation team is correct that the quality of the input context is paramount. Therefore, retrieval-stage metrics are critical because they define the upper bound of the reranker’s potential performance. The teams must ensure that the retrieval stage maintains high recall within the specific depth that the reranker processes.