Engineering team cuts RAG pipeline latency 40% using Bayesian search and hybrid retrieval

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A development team rebuilt their retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline from scratch after standard production deployments proved inadequate for legal, API, and support-ticket use cases. The team replaced fixed 512-token chunking with document-type-specific strategies, including recursive, semantic, and agentic chunking, achieving recall@10 scores between 91% and 97%. They combined vector search with BM25 and cross-encoder reranking using Reciprocal Rank Fusion, which improved relevance correlation from roughly 0.75 to 0.92. A Bayesian-informed search optimization was also applied, ultimately reducing overall query latency by 40%. The team published their configurations and Python code to help other engineers replicate the tunable retrieval pipeline.

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