Understand rerankers. Then watch one run in your browser.
A reranker re-scores your retrieved candidates so the most relevant passages rise to the top. Learn how it works, compare the popular models, and try a cross-encoder live — with zero API cost and nothing leaving your machine.
Runs on transformers.js · 100% client-side · no key required
Start here
Three short guides take you from “what is a reranker?” to a working reranking stage in your RAG pipeline.
What is a reranker?
The two-stage retrieval pattern, why order matters, and where reranking fits.
A reranker scores (query, document) pairs jointly — far more accurate than cosine similarity alone.
Cross-encoder vs bi-encoder
Why bi-encoders are fast and cross-encoders are accurate — and how to use both.
Bi-encoders retrieve at scale; cross-encoders rank with precision. Use them in two stages.
How to add reranking to RAG
Retrieve wide, rerank, keep the best. With code, top-k tips and latency trade-offs.
Retrieve 50+ candidates, rerank, keep 5 — better answers and fewer tokens to the LLM.
Rerank in your browser, right now
Paste a query and a few candidate passages. A real cross-encoder downloads once, caches, and scores every pair locally — you watch the ranking reshuffle in milliseconds. No server, no API key, no data leaving the page.
- Real model weights via transformers.js + ONNX Runtime Web
- Zero API cost and zero abuse risk — it’s all on your device
- See exactly how scores reorder your retrieval results
Compare the rerank models
2026 open SOTA candidates (Qwen3-Reranker), Jina v3 listwise, classic bge/mxbai, hosted Cohere/Voyage — plus late-interaction and instruction APIs.
Qwen3-Reranker
0.6B / 4B / 8B Apache 2.0 family — the multilingual GPU self-host pick. Start at 4B, not 8B.
bge-reranker
Open-weight rerankers from BAAI. Still the best CPU-friendly multilingual default.
Cohere Rerank 4
Mature hosted API in Pro and Fast variants — 32k context, 100+ languages, billed per search.
Jina Reranker v3
0.6B listwise model at 61.94 BEIR — ahead of Qwen3-Reranker-4B. v1-tiny powers our demo.
Voyage rerank-2.5
Hosted rerankers you steer with a natural-language instruction. 32k context, per-token pricing.
mxbai-rerank
Apache 2.0 open weights with a browser-runnable xsmall variant — highest BEIR score in our table.
Also: ColBERT / late-interaction · instruction-following rerank