Michael Ryaboy
Developer Advocate at KDB.AI. Author of accessible explanations of advanced neural reranking methods — particularly cross-encoders and ColBERT — for practitioners moving beyond bi-encoder dense retrieval.
Key Contributions
- Cross-Encoders and ColBERT: Wrote practitioner-oriented explainers covering:
- The quality gap between bi-encoders (fast, pre-computed) and cross-encoders (slow, query-aware, more accurate)
- ColBERT — late interaction model that approximates cross-encoder quality at bi-encoder latency by storing per-token embeddings and computing MaxSim at query time
- When each architecture is appropriate given latency budget and corpus size