RoutIR skill

RoutIR is an HTTP/gRPC service that hosts retrieval engines (dense, sparse, rerankers, fusion, query expanders) behind a uniform API and composes them into multi-stage pipelines with a small DSL. This skill covers the five things you actually do with it:

1. Call a running RoutIR endpoint with the client.
2. Stand up your own RoutIR server, optionally importing services from a master server so users can pipeline local + remote engines together.
3. Wrap a bi-encoder retrieval index.
4. Wrap a cross-encoder reranker.
5. Serve document collections (single- or multi-view).

Run everything through uvx. This project forbids bare pip, python, pytest, ruff. Every command below uses uvx so the deps land in a throwaway venv instead of your conda environment.

The full reference for extending RoutIR with Python lives in examples/CLAUDE.md; pipeline / DSL / config reference in the project CLAUDE.md. This skill is the operational overview — read those when you need depth.

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1. Use the client (and the pipeline DSL)

routir.client.Client is the sync facade (auto-uses gRPC when the server advertises it, falls back to REST). AsyncClient is the async version with the same surface.

from routir.client import Client

with Client(endpoint="http://compute01:5000", api_key="…optional…") as c:
    print(c.avail())                          # what's available
    print(c.transport)                        # "grpc" or "rest"

    # search a single hosted index
    r = c.search(service="qwen3-neuclir", query="…", limit=20)
    # r["scores"] -> {doc_id: float}

    # score a list of passages against a query
    r = c.score(service="my-reranker", query="…", passages=["p1", "p2", …])
    # r["scores"] -> [float, float, …]   (one per passage)

    # fetch document content
    r = c.content(collection="neuclir", id="doc-id-123", view="asr")
    # r["text"] or r["bytes"]

    # run a composed pipeline (the main entry point)
    r = c.pipeline(
        pipeline="{dense%1000, bm25%1000}RRF%100 >> rerank@asr%20",
        query="…",
        collection="neuclir",                 # needed when a stage reranks
        runtime_kwargs={"rerank": {"some_engine_kwarg": 0.5}},  # optional
    )

Endpoint scheme rules: http(s)://… → REST; grpc(s)://… → gRPC; bare host:port is treated as http:// and may auto-upgrade to gRPC if the server advertises grpc_port via /avail. Pass transport="rest" to force REST.

Pipeline DSL — quick reference

DSL form	Meaning
svc%N	Call svc, keep top N.
A%1000 >> B%20	Sequential: A retrieves 1000, B reranks down to 20. B gets role rerank.
{A%K, B%K}Merger%N	Parallel: A and B run concurrently; Merger.fuse_batch fuses to top N.
Expander{A%K, B%K}Merger%N	Expander makes sub-queries; each runs A and B in parallel; all fused.
svc[alias]%N	Name a stage so runtime_kwargs can target it by alias.
svc@view%N	Pick a named view of the collection at rerank time (multi-modal).

Built-in mergers: RRF (reciprocal rank fusion) and ScoreFusion are always available. You only need to write your own fusion engine if you need something neither covers.

Aliases: pipeline_aliases in the server config let you give a long pipeline a short name ("ragtime2": "{zho%100, rus%100, …}ScoreFusion"); the alias is then usable everywhere a service name is. The call-site %N re-caps the alias's outer-most stage.

Bound the result set. /pipeline ignores a top-level limit; the result-set size is whatever the final %N produced. If your pipeline has no %N, you'll get the full inner result.

scripts/query.py is the canonical batch-query script that writes the JSONL run format documented in CLAUDE.md. Copy it when scripting evaluations.

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2. Stand up a local server (and import a master server)

Minimal my-config.json:

{
    "services": [
        { "name": "my-bm25", "engine": "PyseriniBM25",
          "config": {"index_path": "/path/to/bm25-index"},
          "cache": 1024, "cache_ttl": 600,
          "batch_size": 16, "max_wait_time": 0.05 }
    ],
    "collections": [
        { "name": "my-corpus", "doc_path": "/data/corpus.jsonl" }
    ],
    "server_imports": [
        "http://master-host:5000"
    ],
    "file_imports": [
        "./my_extension.py"
    ]
}

server_imports is the master-import mechanism. At startup the local server queries /avail on every entry and registers a Relay-backed local proxy for every remote search / score / content service it doesn't already host. After that, your users can write pipelines that freely mix local and remote services as if they were all on one box:

{my-bm25%1000, remote-qwen3%1000}RRF%100 >> remote-cross-encoder%20

Notes that bite people:

• Local services win on name collision. Remote services with a name already registered locally are skipped, not overridden.
• Each entry can be a dict with endpoint, grpc_endpoint, api_key, transport, etc., not just a bare URL — handy when the master is gRPC.
• Cache relayed content. Reranking against a remote collection re-fetches every doc per query without a cache. Set "relay_content_cache": 4096 (and relay_content_cache_ttl) at the top level of the config, or wire a Redis URL.

Serve it:

# REST only, port 5000
uvx --with "routir[dense] @ ." \
    routir my-config.json --port 5000

# REST + gRPC; add --with for every runtime dep your engines need
uvx --with transformers --with torch --with "routir[dense,grpc] @ ." \
    routir my-config.json --port 5000 --grpc --grpc-port 50051

# With auth (prefer env over --api_key; CLI args show up in ps)
ROUTIR_API_KEY=sekret uvx --with "routir @ ." routir my-config.json --port 5000

Verify it works:

curl http://localhost:5000/avail        # lists search/score/fuse/collection
curl http://localhost:5000/ping         # always unauthenticated; for liveness

/avail is also what server_imports uses for discovery — if your service doesn't appear there, no one else will see it either.

Per-service knobs in services[] that you'll routinely tune:

key	what it does
cache	LRU capacity for this service's results. -1 (default) disables.
cache_ttl	TTL in seconds. Applies to LRU and Redis.
cache_key_fields	Request fields that go into the cache key. Default ["query", "limit"]; add "subset" etc. when they affect results.
cache_redis_url	Use Redis instead of in-memory LRU.
batch_size	Max requests batched into one engine call. Default 32.
max_wait_time	Max seconds to wait for a batch to fill. Default 0.05; raise for throughput, lower for latency.
scoring_disabled	Set to true to refuse to register /score for an engine that can score, when you only want search.

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3. Wrap a bi-encoder with an index

Default path: write zero Python. RoutIR ships Qwen3 and SentenceTransformerEngine and they cover the majority of dense models purely through config. Reach for a custom engine only when neither fits.

3a. Zero-code: external query encoder via OpenAI-compatible API (preferred)

This is the right answer almost always — it keeps the query encoder on its own GPU/process (vLLM, llama.cpp, sglang, …), so RoutIR doesn't have to share VRAM with it and you can scale the encoder independently.

Run your query encoder as an OpenAI-compatible /v1/embeddings server (vLLM, llama.cpp, sglang, TEI — any of them) and point RoutIR at it:

{
    "services": [
        {
            "name": "qwen3-neuclir",
            "engine": "Qwen3",
            "cache": 1024, "cache_ttl": 600,
            "batch_size": 32, "max_wait_time": 0.05,
            "config": {
                "index_path": "/path/to/faiss-index",
                "embedding_base_url": "http://gpu-host:8000/v1/",
                "embedding_model_name": "Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B",
                "api_key": "…or set OPENAI_API_KEY env…",
                "k_scale": 5
            }
        }
    ]
}

Likewise SentenceTransformerEngine covers ME5-Instruct, ArcticEmbed, BGE-M3, Jina-v3, etc. by setting embedding_model_name, instruction, prompt_name_query, task_query, normalize_embeddings. The full key list is on the class in src/routir/models/st.py.

index_path is a directory with index.faiss + index.ids (one doc id per line, in the same order as FAISS vectors). The hfds:<org/repo> prefix auto-downloads from Hugging Face Datasets at startup (e.g. "index_path": "hfds:routir/neuclir-qwen3-8b-faiss-PQ2048x4fs").

3b. Run the query encoder in-process (less ideal)

If you must (e.g. small model, no spare encoder host, sharing VRAM is fine), either drop embedding_base_url from the configs above — both engines fall back to local transformers/sentence-transformers — or write a tiny custom engine if neither fits. The cost is real: the query encoder now contends with everything else this RoutIR process is doing.

If you do need to write your own, use file_imports to ship one .py without touching the routir checkout:

# my_extension.py
from typing import Dict, List
import faiss, numpy as np
from routir.models.abstract import Engine

class MyBiencoderEngine(Engine):
    def __init__(self, name=None, config=None, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(name, config, **kwargs)
        self.encoder = load_my_query_encoder(config["model"])
        self.index = faiss.read_index(f"{config['index_path']}/index.faiss")
        with open(f"{config['index_path']}/index.ids") as f:
            self.doc_ids = [ln.strip() for ln in f]

    async def search_batch(self, queries: List[str], limit=1000, **kwargs) -> List[Dict[str, float]]:
        if isinstance(limit, int):
            limit = [limit] * len(queries)
        q_emb = self.encoder.encode(queries)                    # (N, d)
        scores, idx = self.index.search(q_emb.astype(np.float32),
                                        k=max(limit) * 2)
        return [
            dict(list(zip([self.doc_ids[i] for i in idx[qi]], scores[qi].tolist()))[:k])
            for qi, k in enumerate(limit)
        ]

{
    "file_imports": ["./my_extension.py"],
    "services": [{
        "name": "my-dense",
        "engine": "MyBiencoderEngine",
        "config": {"model": "org/name", "index_path": "/path/to/index"},
        "batch_size": 16, "max_wait_time": 0.05
    }]
}

The class name in engine: must match the Python class name exactly — that's how lookup works. There is no registration boilerplate.

If your engine can also score query-passage pairs cheaply (true for dense models — it's just q @ p.T), implement score_batch on the same class too and a /score endpoint registers automatically. See Qwen3.score_batch for the canonical implementation.

Building the FAISS index is out of scope here — produce index.faiss + index.ids any way you like and point index_path at the directory.

---

4. Wrap a reranker as a scorer

A reranker is an Engine that implements score_batch. The input shape is intentionally flat-with-strides and trips everyone up the first time, so read this section before you write the method.

The contract

async def score_batch(
    self,
    queries: List[str],                  # N queries
    passages: List[str],                 # flattened over ALL queries
    candidate_length: List[int] = None,  # passages-per-query strides
    **kwargs,
) -> List[List[float]]:                  # one score list per query

• passages is not grouped per query — it's one flat list across the whole batch. candidate_length[i] says how many consecutive passages belong to queries[i]. So sum(candidate_length) == len(passages) and len(candidate_length) == len(queries).
• The return value is grouped: one list of floats per query, in passage order, higher = more relevant.
• candidate_length=None defaults to [len(passages)] (all passages belong to a single query).

The canonical implementation skeleton — copy this

# my_reranker.py — ship via file_imports
from typing import List
from routir.models.abstract import Engine

class MyReranker:
    """Sync model wrapper. Knows nothing about RoutIR or async."""
    def __init__(self, model_path: str, batch_size: int = 32):
        self.model = load_my_model(model_path)
        self.batch_size = batch_size

    def score(self, pairs):
        # pairs: List[Tuple[str, str]] of (query, passage)
        # return: List[float] of the same length, higher = more relevant
        out = []
        for i in range(0, len(pairs), self.batch_size):
            out.extend(self.model.predict(pairs[i:i + self.batch_size]))
        return out


class MyRerankerEngine(Engine):
    """RoutIR adapter. Implements score_batch ONLY."""

    def __init__(self, name=None, config=None, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(name, config, **kwargs)
        self.model = MyReranker(
            model_path=config.get("model", "org/reranker"),
            batch_size=config.get("batch_size", 32),
        )

    async def score_batch(self, queries, passages, candidate_length=None, **kwargs):
        if candidate_length is None:
            candidate_length = [len(passages)]
        assert len(candidate_length) == len(queries)
        assert sum(candidate_length) == len(passages)

        # 1) expand queries so each passage has its query alongside it
        expanded = [queries[i] for i, n in enumerate(candidate_length) for _ in range(n)]
        pairs = list(zip(expanded, passages))

        # 2) score all pairs at once (sync call inside async is fine for GPU work)
        flat = self.model.score(pairs)

        # 3) regroup back into per-query lists, in original passage order
        out, cursor = [], 0
        for n in candidate_length:
            out.append(flat[cursor:cursor + n])
            cursor += n
        return out

Config:

{
    "file_imports": ["./my_reranker.py"],
    "services": [{
        "name": "my-reranker",
        "engine": "MyRerankerEngine",
        "config": {"model": "org/reranker", "batch_size": 32},
        "cache": 1024, "cache_ttl": 600,
        "batch_size": 16, "max_wait_time": 0.05
    }]
}

Smoke test:

curl -X POST http://localhost:5000/score -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"service":"my-reranker","query":"q","passages":["p1","p2","p3"]}'
# -> {"scores": [...], ...}

In a pipeline, the reranker is the second stage:

my-bm25%1000 >> my-reranker%20

The pipeline runs my-bm25 to get 1000 candidates, fetches each candidate's text from the collection's /content endpoint, then calls your score_batch(queries, flattened_passages, candidate_length) and keeps the top 20.

Gotchas

• Don't override score (the singular one). The base class implements it as a one-element call to score_batch. Overriding both is a known legacy footgun.
• Return floats in the original passage order. The pipeline pairs your output back to candidate ids positionally — don't sort inside score_batch.
• Fallbacks beat crashes. If a single pair errors, return 0.5 (or any neutral score) for it rather than blowing up the whole batch.
• Truncate to your model's context. Long passages will OOM or get silently clipped by tokenizers.
• Bytes/multimodal rerankers (keyframes, audio): set accepts_view_kind = "bytes" as a class attribute. Then passages is List[List[bytes]] (one inner list per doc, possibly empty / multi-blob). REST /score refuses bytes engines — reach them via pipeline DSL or gRPC Score. See examples/CLAUDE.md for the full multimodal contract.
• If candidates aren't supplied by the pipeline (i.e. you're hitting /score standalone or the engine should run its own first-stage), look at the Reranker base class in src/routir/models/abstract.py — it implements search_batch for you via an upstream_service + text_service. Most users only need score_batch and the pipeline supplies candidates.

---

5. Serve a document collection (single- and multi-view)

Collections power /content and feed text/bytes to reranker stages. Every collection has one or more named views; a view picks a backend (JSONL, tar, local files) and a modality (text or bytes).

Single text view (the common case)

Either form works. The "legacy" form is still fully supported and is the shortest path.

{
    "collections": [
        { "name": "my-corpus", "doc_path": "/data/corpus.jsonl",
          "id_field": "docid", "content_field": "text" }
    ]
}

Equivalent modern form (use this for anything non-trivial):

{
    "collections": [{
        "name": "my-corpus",
        "views": {
            "text": {
                "kind": "text",
                "source": {
                    "source": "text_jsonl",
                    "doc_path": "/data/corpus.jsonl",
                    "id_field": "docid",
                    "content_fields": ["title", "body"],
                    "sep": "\n"
                }
            }
        }
    }]
}

JSONL access is O(1): RoutIR builds a .offsetmap sidecar on first open. Random access then uses byte offsets.

Multi-view

{
    "collections": [{
        "name": "multivent",
        "default_view": "asr",
        "views": {
            "asr": {
                "kind": "text",
                "source": {"source": "text_jsonl",
                           "doc_path": "/data/mv.jsonl",
                           "id_field": "chunk_id",
                           "content_fields": "asr_transcript"}
            },
            "keyframe": {
                "kind": "bytes",
                "source": {
                    "source": "tar",
                    "tar_template": "/data/mv/shard_{shard:06d}.tar",
                    "shard_resolver": {
                        "kind": "manifest",
                        "path": "/data/mv/catalog.csv",
                        "id_column": "chunk_id",
                        "shard_column": "shard_index"
                    },
                    "matcher": {"kind": "glob", "pattern": "{id}.kf_uni5s.t*.jpg"},
                    "mime": "image/jpeg",
                    "cache_dir": "/expscratch/me/routir/.cache"
                }
            }
        }
    }]
}

Pipeline stages pick a view with @view:

{asr-search%1000, kf-search%1000}RRF%200 >> kf-reranker@keyframe%20

The kf-reranker stage gets the keyframe view's bytes; asr-reranker (if you added one) would @asr and receive strings.

default_view is used when a stage omits @view. Required to be set explicitly when there are multiple views; auto-elected when there's only one.

View backends

source:	Kind	Use for
text_jsonl	text	One JSONL file (optionally gzipped). The default.
local_path	bytes	One-or-many files per id (path_template or path_glob).
tar	bytes	Sharded .tar archives with a member-name matcher.

For tar collections, the shard resolver decides which tar holds a given id: manifest (CSV/TSV id,shard), modulo (hash-based), or substring (slice of the id is the shard token).

Sidecar caches and warmup — important on shared filesystems

tar and text_jsonl backends build sidecar indexes (.taridx, .offsetmap) on first access. Scanning 50–500 K members in a tar on a cold request will stall.

• Always set cache_dir per view when the dataset mount is read-only (most shared FS). Point at an in-tree ./.cache/ by convention.
• Pre-build sidecars off the login node with scripts/warmup_slurm.sh <config.json> [view]. One sbatch job per view — never per shard. See CLAUDE.md for the rule and the exact command.

Caching /content

CollectionConfig.cache is 256 entries by default and keys on (view, id) — bytes views especially need this. Crank it up for hot corpora; set to 0 to disable.

For server_importsed remote collections, enable relay_content_cache at the top level of the config; otherwise every reranked candidate triggers a remote fetch.

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Where to look when this skill isn't enough

• DSL grammar and execution model: src/routir/pipeline/parser.py and src/routir/pipeline/pipeline.py. The grammar at the top of parser.py is short and authoritative.
• Engine contract: src/routir/models/abstract.py — the docstrings on search_batch, score_batch, decompose_query_batch, fuse_batch are the source of truth.
• Reference engine implementations: src/routir/models/ (built-ins) and examples/*_extension.py (file-imports pattern).
• Config schema: src/routir/config/config.py — every JSON field the server accepts is a Pydantic field with a docstring.
• Detailed extension how-to: examples/CLAUDE.md.
• Project conventions and warmup: CLAUDE.md.