Better Together: Complementary Query Rewriting Under a Strong RAG Baseline
Researchers evaluated whether query rewriting improves RAG performance when using a high-quality retrieval and reranking pipeline.
The study tested four query-rewriting strategies against strong baselines like HyDE and Query2Doc across three datasets. Results suggest that when using a competitive pipeline—incorporating BGE dense retrieval, cross-encoder reranking, and MMR diversification—the marginal gains from query rewriting are limited.