DeBERTa Quality Classifier - Absolute Quality Assessment

Replace MS-MARCO with NVIDIA DeBERTa quality classifier for query-independent quality scoring.

Key Features

• 3-class classifier (Low/Medium/High) for absolute quality assessment
• Query-independent evaluation (no search context needed)
• Multi-model architecture (DeBERTa default, MS-MARCO legacy)
• GPU acceleration support (CUDA/MPS/DirectML)

Performance Improvements

• +60% quality scores (0.749 avg vs 0.469 baseline)
• 2.4x high quality identifications (75.7% vs 32.2%)
• Uniform distribution (mean 0.60-0.70)
• <5% perfect scores (vs 20% with MS-MARCO)

Migration

python scripts/quality/migrate_to_deberta.py

See CHANGELOG for complete details.

Resolves: #268