LLM Reranker Production Evaluation: Guarding RAG Retrieval Quality with Golden Query Sets, nDCG, and Latency Budgets
A deep dive into production evaluation methodologies for LLM Rerankers in RAG systems, covering golden query set construction, nDCG and MRR ranking metrics, candidate set budget optimization, latency and cost governance, canary release gates, and rollback strategies to prevent retrieval ranking degradation.