On a new benchmark of post-April 2025 queries, LLM rerankers show a 5-15% performance drop compared with familiar benchmarks, and lightweight models match them on efficiency and sometimes accuracy.
ASRank: Zero-Shot Re-Ranking with Answer Scent for Document Retrieval
1 Pith paper cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models have drawn considerable attention in modern open-domain question answering. The effectiveness of RAG depends on the quality of the top retrieved documents. However, conventional retrieval methods sometimes fail to rank the most relevant documents at the top. In this paper, we introduce ASRank, a new re-ranking method based on scoring retrieved documents using zero-shot answer scent which relies on a pre-trained large language model to compute the likelihood of the document-derived answers aligning with the answer scent. Our approach demonstrates marked improvements across several datasets, including NQ, TriviaQA, WebQA, ArchivalQA, HotpotQA, and Entity Questions. Notably, ASRank increases Top-1 retrieval accuracy on NQ from $19.2\%$ to $46.5\%$ for MSS and $22.1\%$ to $47.3\%$ for BM25. It also shows strong retrieval performance on several datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods (47.3 Top-1 by ASRank vs 35.4 by UPR by BM25).
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How Good are LLM-based Rerankers? An Empirical Analysis of State-of-the-Art Reranking Models
On a new benchmark of post-April 2025 queries, LLM rerankers show a 5-15% performance drop compared with familiar benchmarks, and lightweight models match them on efficiency and sometimes accuracy.