Parameterized Dense-Sparse Fusion for Hybrid Retrieval: Tuning a Rank-Score Mix on BEIR SciFact with Qdrant
We study a parameterized hybrid ranker that fuses a dense embedding list and a sparse lexical list. The method has a small, explicit parameter vector: a dense prior $α\in [0,1]$, a score-versus-rank mix $λ\in [0,1]$, an RRF smoothing parameter $κ> 0$, optional list-geometry coefficients that move $α$ per query, and a router margin $τ$ that can turn sparse search off. We grid-search those ranges on SciFact train (809 queries) and freeze the chosen values on SciFact test (300). The tuned rank-score mix ($α= 0.8$, $λ= 0.75$, $κ= 20$) reaches 0.753 nDCG@10 and 0.889 recall@10, outperforming dense BGE (0.742 / 0.871) and equal-weight RRF (0.707 nDCG@10) on that test split. A list-conditioned $...
| Authors | Satyanarayan Pati, Srikanth Patil |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 19 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 September 2026 |
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