In the automerging notebook of the RAG short course, when constructing the automerging engine I noticed that the base automerging_retirever was passed to the RetrieverQueryEngine.from_args function. First, I ran the cell as is and noted the results. Then I changed it to pass the retriever to the RetrieverQueryEngine.from_args function and ran the cell again. The results were identical. So I started wondering whether there was any difference between the two or are the two the same and the only thing to be had with using the retriever was the versbose logging.
Code snippet to support my comment:
automerging_retriever = automerging_index.as_retriever(
similarity_top_k=12
)
retriever = AutoMergingRetriever(
automerging_retriever,
automerging_index.storage_context,
verbose=True
)
rerank = SentenceTransformerRerank(top_n=6, model=“BAAI/bge-reranker-base”)
auto_merging_engine = RetrieverQueryEngine.from_args(
automerging_retriever, node_postprocessors=[rerank]
)