As retrieval systems scale, high-quality reranking becomes increasingly important. However, most existing rerankers, whether encoder-based or decoder-based, jointly encode the query and passage, tightly coupling their computation and limiting deployment efficiency as well as flexibility.
The paper introduces DEPT, a method that trains a single decoder-only large language model to both expand queries and encode documents for retrieval. By preserving document embeddings close to their initial cached values while allowing gradients to flow through the generator, DEPT stabilizes retrieval targets and enables efficient index reuse and online hard‑negative mining. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark with Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507 and LLaMA‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct show that DEPT outperforms training‑free, independently trained, and staged unified baselines, with ablations confirming the benefits of preservation, whitening, end‑to‑end expansion training, and online negatives.
By Jingyuan Wang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Mingxin Li, Yanzhao Zhang
arXiv:2606.22807v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: As retrieval systems scale, effective and efficient reranking becomes increasingly important. However, most existing encoder- and decoder-based rer...
By Xinping Zhao, Jiaxin Xu, Ziqi Dai, Xin Zhang, Huiyao Chen, Shouzheng Huang, Xianhao Xiong, Danyu Tang, Xinshuo Hu, Guohong Fu, Meishan Zhang, Baotian Hu
arXiv:2608. 14841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-document visual question answering (VQA) over documents of tens to hundreds of pages mixing text, tables, charts, and figures typically follows retrieve-then-read pipelines.
By Guanchen Wu, Jiayuan Ding, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Carl Yang
arXiv:2604. 02091v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Rerankers play a pivotal role in refining retrieval results for Retrieval-Augmented Generation.
By Yuhang Wu, Xiangqing Shen, Fanfan Wang, Cangqi Zhou, Zhen Wu, Xinyu Dai, Rui Xia
E2Rank (Efficient Embedding-based Ranking) is a unified framework that extends a single text embedding model to perform both retrieval and listwise reranking. By treating the listwise prompt—constructed from the query and its top‑K candidates—as a pseudo‑relevance feedback query, E2Rank reranks via cosine similarity against precomputed document embeddings, avoiding costly autoregressive decoding. The approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on BEIR, competitive performance on the reasoning‑intensive BRIGHT benchmark, lower latency than existing LLM‑based rerankers, and improved embedding performance on MTEB—all within a single model.
By Qi Liu, Yanzhao Zhang, Mingxin Li, Dingkun Long, Pengjun Xie, Jiaxin Mao
arXiv:2608.22767v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long-term language-model agents accumulate memories across interactions, but their retrievers typically do not accumulate retrieval experience. Semanti...
By Qi Feng, Chris Ding, Jicong Fan
arXiv:2607. 11933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-encoders achieve high reranking accuracy in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines but impose quadratic inference costs that limit real-time deployment.
By Shreeya Dasa Lakshminath, Shubhan S
arXiv:2504. 20114v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems face significant challenges in multi-hop question answering (MHQA), where complex queries require synthesizing information across multiple document chunks.
By Zhonghao Li, Kunpeng Zhang, Jinghuai Ou, Shuliang Liu, Xuming Hu
arXiv:2605. 04495v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) relies on evidence ranking to determine what information is exposed to the generator, yet existing retrieval and reranking methods primarily estimate query--document relevance.
By Zhipeng Song, Yizhi Zhou, Xiangyu Kong, Jiulong Jiao, Xuezhou Ye, Chunqi Gao, Xueqing Shi, Yu Wang, Yuhang Zhou, Heng Qi
arXiv:2607. 25182v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The ability to retrieve relevant tables for answering questions is a key task for structured information retrieval.
By Adarsh Singh, Kushal Raj Bhandari, Jianxi Gao, Soham Dan, Vivek Gupta
The paper introduces LLM-QL, a dense retrieval model that harnesses large language models (LLMs) by maximizing query likelihood (QL) as an auxiliary task. It incorporates an Attention Block to limit predictive token attention to document tokens before the ending token and a Document Corruption component that masks parts of the document during prediction. Experiments on MS MARCO and BEIR datasets show that LLM-QL outperforms other LLM-based retrievers, and detailed analyses confirm the effectiveness of its components.
By Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Xiaojie Sun, Shihao Liu, Daiting Shi, Dawei Yin, Xueqi Cheng