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Proposal: add a short “RAG / reranking troubleshooting checklist” (docs only) #66

@onestardao

Description

@onestardao

Hi Rankify team, thanks for releasing this toolkit – the combination of 40+ pre-retrieved datasets, multiple retrieval techniques, rerankers and RAG methods is really valuable for research and teaching.

I have been working on a compact failure-mode checklist for RAG-style pipelines and recently contributed a robustness entry to Harvard MIMS Lab’s ToolUniverse. When using Rankify, it is very easy for users to confuse:

  • retrieval quality vs. reranking quality vs. generation quality
  • configuration issues vs. algorithmic limitations

So I’d like to propose a very small, docs-only addition.

Scope (docs only, no code changes)

  • Add one markdown doc under docs/ (or in the place you prefer), for example:
    • troubleshooting_rag_and_reranking.md
  • Optionally, add a link from the README “Getting started” or “Usage” section.

Suggested outline (kept minimal)

  1. Common failure patterns when using Rankify:
    • good retrieval, bad reranking
    • bad retrieval, good reranking, but still poor final answers
    • configuration mistakes (wrong index, wrong dataset split, stale cache)
    • evaluation mismatch (metric suggests improvement, but answers look worse)
  2. For each pattern:
    • what to check (dataset, split, index path, model name, seed)
    • example commands / configuration snippets to reproduce
  3. A short checklist for opening issues:
    • dataset id, retrieval setting, reranker, RAG method, config + log excerpt

Motivation

  • Rankify is often used as a backbone to compare many RAG and reranking methods in one place.
  • A shared troubleshooting checklist can reduce duplicated “it does not work” issues and make experiment reports more comparable.
  • This is a low-risk documentation change and should be easy to adjust or extend later.

If you think this is useful and in-scope, I’m happy to draft the doc as a PR following your documentation style.

Thank you for considering.

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