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Equation 8 · Part 10 · What Actually Happens Between a Query and an Answer in RAG

Numerator: 1

RRF(d)=∑r∈R1k+r(d)\mathrm{RRF}(d) = \sum_{r \in R} \frac{1}{k + r(d)}
11

What this part means

The complete quantity above the fraction bar.

Its job in the formula

1 occurs above the fraction bar. The numerator is divided by the entire denominator below it.

The passage around this formula

Reciprocal rank fusion avoids the currency problem by discarding scores altogether and combining rank positions instead. For a document d and a set of ranked result lists R , with r(d) the rank of d in a given list and a smoothing constant k : RRF(d)=∑r∈R1k+r(d)\mathrm{RRF}(d) = \sum_{r \in R} \frac{1}{k + r(d)}. Cormack, Clarke, and Buettcher introduced the method and reported that it consistently outperformed both the individual ranked lists and a Condorcet-style fusion baseline, with the specific virtue that it requires no score normalisation across systems with incompatible scoring functions [ 9 ] . That virtue is also its limitation: two documents ranked first in their respective lists count identically toward the fused score…

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Learn the underlying idea

A fraction a/b means a divided by b. The top number is the numerator; the bottom number is the denominator, and it cannot be zero.

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

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