AI engineering glossary · RAG vector search
What is multi-query retrieval?
Multi-query retrieval: Generating several rephrasings of one question, running retrieval for each and merging the results into a single deduplicated list. It reduces sensitivity to one particular wording and improves coverage of the relevant documents in the collection.
Multi-query retrieval: an example
A model writes 3 variants of 'ways to reduce cloud spend', and the union of their top 5 results is deduplicated.
Related terms
More RAG vector search terms
- Multi-tenancy
- Multi-vector retrieval
- Multimodal retrieval
- Nearest neighbour search
- nprobe
- Parent-document retrieval
- pgvector
- Post-filtering
Where you learn it
Multi-query retrieval is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.