Comparative Analysis of Lion and AdamW Optimizers for Cross-Encoder Reranking with MiniLM, GTE, and ModernBERT

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Autores principales: Kumar, Shahil, Pande, Manu, Damle, Anay Yatin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Kumar, Shahil
Pande, Manu
Damle, Anay Yatin
author_facet Kumar, Shahil
Pande, Manu
Damle, Anay Yatin
contents Modern information retrieval systems often employ a two-stage pipeline: an efficient initial retrieval stage followed by a computationally intensive reranking stage. Cross-encoders have shown strong effectiveness for reranking due to their deep analysis of query-document pairs. This paper studies the impact of the Lion optimizer, a recent alternative to AdamW, during fine-tuning of cross-encoder rerankers. We fine-tune three transformer models-MiniLM, GTE, and ModernBERT-on the MS MARCO passage ranking dataset using both optimizers. GTE and ModernBERT support extended context lengths (up to 8192 tokens). We evaluate effectiveness using TREC 2019 Deep Learning Track and MS MARCO dev set (MRR@10). Experiments, run on the Modal cloud platform, reveal that ModernBERT with Lion achieves the best NDCG@10 (0.7225) and MAP (0.5121) on TREC DL 2019, while MiniLM with Lion ties ModernBERT for MRR@10 (0.5988) on MS MARCO dev. Lion also provides superior GPU efficiency, improving utilization by 2.67% to 10.33% across models. We analyze performance trends using standard IR metrics and discuss the optimizer's impact on training dynamics across architectures.
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spellingShingle Comparative Analysis of Lion and AdamW Optimizers for Cross-Encoder Reranking with MiniLM, GTE, and ModernBERT
Kumar, Shahil
Pande, Manu
Damle, Anay Yatin
Information Retrieval
Modern information retrieval systems often employ a two-stage pipeline: an efficient initial retrieval stage followed by a computationally intensive reranking stage. Cross-encoders have shown strong effectiveness for reranking due to their deep analysis of query-document pairs. This paper studies the impact of the Lion optimizer, a recent alternative to AdamW, during fine-tuning of cross-encoder rerankers. We fine-tune three transformer models-MiniLM, GTE, and ModernBERT-on the MS MARCO passage ranking dataset using both optimizers. GTE and ModernBERT support extended context lengths (up to 8192 tokens). We evaluate effectiveness using TREC 2019 Deep Learning Track and MS MARCO dev set (MRR@10). Experiments, run on the Modal cloud platform, reveal that ModernBERT with Lion achieves the best NDCG@10 (0.7225) and MAP (0.5121) on TREC DL 2019, while MiniLM with Lion ties ModernBERT for MRR@10 (0.5988) on MS MARCO dev. Lion also provides superior GPU efficiency, improving utilization by 2.67% to 10.33% across models. We analyze performance trends using standard IR metrics and discuss the optimizer's impact on training dynamics across architectures.
title Comparative Analysis of Lion and AdamW Optimizers for Cross-Encoder Reranking with MiniLM, GTE, and ModernBERT
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18297