Multi-stage Large Language Model Pipelines Can Outperform GPT-4o in Relevance Assessment

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Main Authors: Schnabel, Julian A., Trippas, Johanne R., Scholer, Falk, Hettiachchi, Danula
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Schnabel, Julian A.
Trippas, Johanne R.
Scholer, Falk
Hettiachchi, Danula
author_facet Schnabel, Julian A.
Trippas, Johanne R.
Scholer, Falk
Hettiachchi, Danula
contents The effectiveness of search systems is evaluated using relevance labels that indicate the usefulness of documents for specific queries and users. While obtaining these relevance labels from real users is ideal, scaling such data collection is challenging. Consequently, third-party annotators are employed, but their inconsistent accuracy demands costly auditing, training, and monitoring. We propose an LLM-based modular classification pipeline that divides the relevance assessment task into multiple stages, each utilising different prompts and models of varying sizes and capabilities. Applied to TREC Deep Learning (TREC-DL), one of our approaches showed an 18.4% Krippendorff's $α$ accuracy increase over OpenAI's GPT-4o mini while maintaining a cost of about 0.2 USD per million input tokens, offering a more efficient and scalable solution for relevance assessment. This approach beats the baseline performance of GPT-4o (5 USD). With a pipeline approach, even the accuracy of the GPT-4o flagship model, measured in $α$, could be improved by 9.7%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_14296
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-stage Large Language Model Pipelines Can Outperform GPT-4o in Relevance Assessment
Schnabel, Julian A.
Trippas, Johanne R.
Scholer, Falk
Hettiachchi, Danula
Information Retrieval
H.3.3
The effectiveness of search systems is evaluated using relevance labels that indicate the usefulness of documents for specific queries and users. While obtaining these relevance labels from real users is ideal, scaling such data collection is challenging. Consequently, third-party annotators are employed, but their inconsistent accuracy demands costly auditing, training, and monitoring. We propose an LLM-based modular classification pipeline that divides the relevance assessment task into multiple stages, each utilising different prompts and models of varying sizes and capabilities. Applied to TREC Deep Learning (TREC-DL), one of our approaches showed an 18.4% Krippendorff's $α$ accuracy increase over OpenAI's GPT-4o mini while maintaining a cost of about 0.2 USD per million input tokens, offering a more efficient and scalable solution for relevance assessment. This approach beats the baseline performance of GPT-4o (5 USD). With a pipeline approach, even the accuracy of the GPT-4o flagship model, measured in $α$, could be improved by 9.7%.
title Multi-stage Large Language Model Pipelines Can Outperform GPT-4o in Relevance Assessment
topic Information Retrieval
H.3.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.14296