From c83bd2d4f8072e730ff63c587ef8ba9e410c5f59 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Yiorgis Gozadinos Date: Tue, 26 May 2026 12:29:45 +0300 Subject: [PATCH] Document that text-only rerankers do not work on multi-modal search results --- docs/configuration/qa.md | 5 +++++ 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+) diff --git a/docs/configuration/qa.md b/docs/configuration/qa.md index f8f76f7f..e425b116 100644 --- a/docs/configuration/qa.md +++ b/docs/configuration/qa.md @@ -18,6 +18,11 @@ Context expansion is automatic and section-aware. For structured documents (with !!! note "Reranking behavior" When a reranker is configured, search automatically retrieves 10x the requested limit, then reranks to return the final count. This improves result quality without requiring you to adjust `limit`. +!!! warning "Reranker compatibility with multimodal content" + Text-only rerankers (mxbai, cohere, jina, vllm, cross-encoder) score documents by their text content. Picture chunks emitted by docling have empty content, so the reranker scores them near zero and drops them from the top results. + + If retrieval relies on visual content (charts, figures, screenshots with text rendered as pixels), disable reranking by leaving `reranking.model` empty so the multimodal embedder's ranking survives. + ## Question Answering Configuration Configure the rag skill (used by `client.ask`, `haiku-rag ask`, and the MCP `ask_question` tool):