Introducing User-Defined Functions for Vectara

Vectara has introduced user-defined sorting functions, allowing users to override the ranking function with their own custom functions. These new capabilities provide more granular control over result ordering and reduce LLM costs by considering additional signals such as recency of information, price, or average rating. Users can use mathematical functions and metadata fields to influence the ranking, enabling them to customize Vectara's functionality to meet specific application needs. The new UDF (user-defined function) reranking capabilities are available for use in various scenarios, including retrieval-augmented generation and summarization tasks, allowing users to tailor the information fed into the generative LLM.