2026· Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics· pp. 6665-6681· 0 citations· 44 references
Computer Science
TL;DR
SARK is proposed, a style-augmented multi-task framework that prioritizes effective knowledge over stylistic perturbations in the reranker model and improves generation performance across multiple LLMs under mixed-style conditions.
Abstract
Rerankers are critical in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for filtering evidence that enhances the accurate generation of LLMs. With the extension to open-domain scenarios, rerankers are inevitably deployed on mixed-style corpora, whereas most existing rerankers are mainly trained on well-edited texts. A rarely explored issue lies in enabling rerankers to maximally capture the effective knowledge for downstream LLMs without being misled by stylistic features. To address this issue, we propose SARK ( S tyle-A daptive R eranker with K nowledge Prioritization), a style-augmented multi-task framework that prioritizes effective knowledge over stylistic perturbations. SARK performs multi-granular knowledge mining by using an LLM to derive passage-level super-vision on whether a passage helps or harms answer correctness, and list-level relative ranking preferences over candidate passages. It then jointly optimizes the reranker model with passage-level classification and list-level ranking objectives via style-augmented multi-task learning, encouraging the model to focus on the information needed for answering under mixed-style scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SARK improves generation performance across multiple LLMs under mixed-style conditions.
We introduce SciRet, a compute-aware empirical study of retrieval-augmented generation for scientific question answering over CORD-19. Rather than proposing a new model, we evaluate a fixed scientific RAG pipeline across three corpus scales: 1,034 chunks (1K papers), 5,160 chunks (5K papers), and 15,480 chunks (15K papers). The pipeline combines sentence-window chunking, BM25, BGE-M3 dense retrieval, reciprocal rank fusion, optional cross-encoder reranking, and grounded answer generation. Across these settings, hybrid retrieval is more robust than either sparse-only or dense-only retrieval in our setting, reaching Recall@10 of 1.000 at 1K and 15K. In contrast, an MS MARCO-trained cross-encoder reranker reduces precision on the scientific corpus, suggesting that domain mismatch can outweigh the benefits of stronger query-passage interaction. Generation faithfulness measured with RAGAS increases with corpus scale in our setup. Retrieval evaluation uses pseudo-relevance labels derived from the hybrid system, so we treat the results as controlled comparative evidence rather than a benchmark claim. We release code, indexes, and evaluation outputs to support replication and follow-up studies.
Kaysarul Anas Apurba, Mahade Hasan, Rofiqul Alam Shehab et al.· 0 citations
AD-Reranker is proposed, a novel framework that shifts reranker training from proxy imitation to answer-driven utility optimization, and reformulate the reranker as an environment-grounded agent that interacts with a downstream reader, modeled as a deterministic environment.
Keyu Zhu, Shuanghong Shen, Xianquan Wang et al.· Annual International ACM SIG...· 0 citations
TabRank is presented, a framework for training reasoning rerankers for Tabular Retrieval that generalizes effectively to multi-table reasoning and significantly improves performance across a variety of table retrieval datasets.
Adarsh Singh, K. Bhandari, Jianxi Gao et al.· arXiv.org· 0 citations
The Adaptive Multi-Stage Vector Retrieval (AMSVR) framework is proposed, prioritising weighted, drift-resistant composition over uniform fusion, and offers tailored configurations: AMSVR-Scientific (dense + tuned hybrid) peaks at NDCG@10 = 0.7570 on SciFact, while AMSVR-Full (seven stages) targets broader, noisier corpora where Recall@100 matters most.
Samsudeen Alabi Bankole, Yakub Kayode Saheed· NLP & Big Data· 0 citations
This work proposes Trident, with two complementary components: Trident-R, a retriever-agnostic LLM reranker that converts each candidate into an LLM-readable semantic record, then performs a single adaptive-K rerank call; and Trident-S, a generation-side module that prompts the VLM under topical, entity, and structural lenses before synthesis.
Guanchen Wu, Jia-Yuan Ding, Subhabrata Mukherjee et al.· 0 citations
Composed image retrieval (CIR) retrieves a target image from a reference image and a text modification. This paper studies metadata-available CIR reranking, where a fixed CIR model first returns a candidate pool and gallery metadata is then used for second-stage concept-guided scoring. We introduce AutoConcept, a training-free reranker that converts concept evidence into an interpretable memory. AutoConcept filters noisy concepts, activates query-relevant positive constraints with an auxiliary negative penalty, and combines base retrieval scores with metadata-based concept-candidate alignment through inference-time calibration. On FashionIQ, AutoConcept yields significant early-rank improvements over WeiMoCIR and consistent plug-in gains on LinCIR candidate pools. Metadata-aware controls show that structured concept memory adds signal beyond direct query-text and extracted-attribute matching, while a query-only variant further supports the effectiveness of concept-level reranking. A supplementary real-human concept-label study indicates that the same memory interface can consume participant-provided evidence. These results position AutoConcept as an interpretable concept-memory reranker for product-style CIR galleries with available metadata.
Tianyi Wang, Tian-Jiao Wu· 0 citations
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