Dense + sparse retrievers

Two perspectives. One shared definition of relevance.

A strong answer often needs both meaning and keywords. Dense encoders capture semantic context—synonyms, paraphrases, and domain jargon—while sparse heads retain lexical cues such as ticket IDs and product codes. Fine-tuning them on the same corpus gives both retrievers a shared definition of relevance while preserving complementary signals.

Semantic coverage

Dense encoders speak your domain

Fine-tuned on docs, tickets, chats, and runbooks, dense models capture synonyms, paraphrases, and jargon that matter to your team.

  • Understands how customers describe symptoms and intent.
  • Can be retuned as domain language and query patterns change.
Lexical precision

Sparse heads anchor exact signals

Sparse retrievers stay sharp on IDs, SKUs, error codes, and policy names, giving you deterministic hooks when you need them.

  • Joint training keeps sparse weights aligned with dense meaning.
  • Hard negatives sharpen discrimination between near-misses.
Ops ready

Hand-off playbooks for different infrastructure

Deploy dense-only, sparse-only, or hybrid blends with open weights, ANN recipes, and documented telemetry patterns.

  • Reference integrations for your vector + inverted indexes.
  • Adjust blends without a retrain using provided fusion weights.

How dense + sparse dual encoders pay off

Unified training means both models respect the same evaluation metrics and telemetry budgets.

Meaning + keywords

Dense encoders grasp synonyms, paraphrases, and domain jargon while sparse models anchor to IDs, error codes, and feature names.

Shift-aware training

Joint fine-tuning on representative hard negatives keeps both encoders aligned to the same domain language and edge cases.

Fits existing infrastructure

Plug into existing vector stores and search clusters; we hand over open weights, ANN recipes, and batching strategies.

Flexible deployment

Run dense-only, sparse-only, or hybrid blends. Deploy via hosted endpoints or ship the open weights into your VPC.