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feat: cross-encoder reranker (deferred) #101

Description

@Lucas-Bur

What to build

Add a cross-encoder reranker to the query pipeline. After RRF fusion (#81), run a small cross-encoder model on the top 20-50 results to re-rank them. Cross-encoders see (query, chunk) as a pair, enabling interaction-aware scoring that dense embeddings miss.

Decision: Defer implementation

  • Now: Skip (C). RRF + header-lex boost provides strong baseline.
  • Later: Evaluate tiny-reranker-v1 (upcoming, ~70-90 MB ONNX INT8, distilled from Qwen3-8B). If benchmarks show >10% quality gain over RRF alone, integrate.
  • Alternative: Qwen3-Reranker-0.6B (573 MB) is available now but too large for MVP.

Acceptance criteria (for future implementation)

  • Reranker runs on top N results after RRF fusion
  • Configurable via config.reranker.enabled (default: false)
  • Model auto-downloads on first use
  • Latency impact documented and acceptable
  • Adapter test verifies reranking improves score order vs RRF-only baseline

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