Ablation Studies
Compare lexical-only, vector-only, hybrid, reranking on/off, chunk-size variants, and prompt variants. Keep other factors fixed where possible. Report quality, latency, and cost, and slice results by query type, source, language, and risk. Averages can hide critical regressions. Version configurations and reproduce the winning setup.
Implementation example
Baseline: vector + fixed chunks
A: lexical only
B: hybrid
C: hybrid + reranker
Compare recall, support, latency, and cost.💡 Ablations identify which components contribute measurable value.
Key Takeaways
- Inspect the relevant pipeline stage instead of guessing.
- Preserve source provenance, versions, and access scope.
- Measure quality on representative queries.
Knowledge Check
Why vary one component at a time?