English

Scaling Down, LiTting Up: Efficient Zero-Shot Listwise Reranking with Seq2seq Encoder-Decoder Models

Information Retrieval 2023-12-27 v1

Abstract

Recent work in zero-shot listwise reranking using LLMs has achieved state-of-the-art results. However, these methods are not without drawbacks. The proposed methods rely on large LLMs with billions of parameters and limited context sizes. This paper introduces LiT5-Distill and LiT5-Score, two methods for efficient zero-shot listwise reranking, leveraging T5 sequence-to-sequence encoder-decoder models. Our approaches demonstrate competitive reranking effectiveness compared to recent state-of-the-art LLM rerankers with substantially smaller models. Through LiT5-Score, we also explore the use of cross-attention to calculate relevance scores to perform reranking, eliminating the reliance on external passage relevance labels for training. We present a range of models from 220M parameters to 3B parameters, all with strong reranking results, challenging the necessity of large-scale models for effective zero-shot reranking and opening avenues for more efficient listwise reranking solutions. We provide code and scripts to reproduce our results at https://github.com/castorini/LiT5.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.16098,
  title  = {Scaling Down, LiTting Up: Efficient Zero-Shot Listwise Reranking with Seq2seq Encoder-Decoder Models},
  author = {Manveer Singh Tamber and Ronak Pradeep and Jimmy Lin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.16098},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:02:14.819Z