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Negative Documents and Hard Negatives in RAG Training (ANSWERED)

Model BasedRAGMedium12 min read

Medium RAG interview on hard negatives for embedding/reranker quality.

TL;DR — Quick Answer

Hard negatives are near-miss documents that look similar but are irrelevant. Training with them teaches the embedder/reranker to separate subtle differences, improving precision@k more than easy random negatives alone.

The Interview Question

What are hard negatives in retrieval training, and how do they improve a RAG embedding or reranker model?

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