FIRST: Faster Improved Listwise Reranking with Single Token Decoding

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Reddy, Revanth Gangi, Doo, JaeHyeok, Xu, Yifei, Sultan, Md Arafat, Swain, Deevya, Sil, Avirup, Ji, Heng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Reddy, Revanth Gangi
Doo, JaeHyeok
Xu, Yifei
Sultan, Md Arafat
Swain, Deevya
Sil, Avirup
Ji, Heng
author_facet Reddy, Revanth Gangi
Doo, JaeHyeok
Xu, Yifei
Sultan, Md Arafat
Swain, Deevya
Sil, Avirup
Ji, Heng
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of information retrieval, particularly for reranking. Listwise LLM rerankers have showcased superior performance and generalizability compared to existing supervised approaches. However, conventional listwise LLM reranking methods lack efficiency as they provide ranking output in the form of a generated ordered sequence of candidate passage identifiers. Further, they are trained with the typical language modeling objective, which treats all ranking errors uniformly--potentially at the cost of misranking highly relevant passages. Addressing these limitations, we introduce FIRST, a novel listwise LLM reranking approach leveraging the output logits of the first generated identifier to directly obtain a ranked ordering of the candidates. Further, we incorporate a learning-to-rank loss during training, prioritizing ranking accuracy for the more relevant passages. Empirical results demonstrate that FIRST accelerates inference by 50% while maintaining a robust ranking performance with gains across the BEIR benchmark. Finally, to illustrate the practical effectiveness of listwise LLM rerankers, we investigate their application in providing relevance feedback for retrievers during inference. Our results show that LLM rerankers can provide a stronger distillation signal compared to cross-encoders, yielding substantial improvements in retriever recall after relevance feedback.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_15657
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FIRST: Faster Improved Listwise Reranking with Single Token Decoding
Reddy, Revanth Gangi
Doo, JaeHyeok
Xu, Yifei
Sultan, Md Arafat
Swain, Deevya
Sil, Avirup
Ji, Heng
Information Retrieval
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of information retrieval, particularly for reranking. Listwise LLM rerankers have showcased superior performance and generalizability compared to existing supervised approaches. However, conventional listwise LLM reranking methods lack efficiency as they provide ranking output in the form of a generated ordered sequence of candidate passage identifiers. Further, they are trained with the typical language modeling objective, which treats all ranking errors uniformly--potentially at the cost of misranking highly relevant passages. Addressing these limitations, we introduce FIRST, a novel listwise LLM reranking approach leveraging the output logits of the first generated identifier to directly obtain a ranked ordering of the candidates. Further, we incorporate a learning-to-rank loss during training, prioritizing ranking accuracy for the more relevant passages. Empirical results demonstrate that FIRST accelerates inference by 50% while maintaining a robust ranking performance with gains across the BEIR benchmark. Finally, to illustrate the practical effectiveness of listwise LLM rerankers, we investigate their application in providing relevance feedback for retrievers during inference. Our results show that LLM rerankers can provide a stronger distillation signal compared to cross-encoders, yielding substantial improvements in retriever recall after relevance feedback.
title FIRST: Faster Improved Listwise Reranking with Single Token Decoding
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15657