English

Beyond Sequential Reranking: Reranker-Guided Search Improves Reasoning Intensive Retrieval

Information Retrieval 2025-09-10 v1 Computation and Language Machine Learning

Abstract

The widely used retrieve-and-rerank pipeline faces two critical limitations: they are constrained by the initial retrieval quality of the top-k documents, and the growing computational demands of LLM-based rerankers restrict the number of documents that can be effectively processed. We introduce Reranker-Guided-Search (RGS), a novel approach that bypasses these limitations by directly retrieving documents according to reranker preferences rather than following the traditional sequential reranking method. Our method uses a greedy search on proximity graphs generated by approximate nearest neighbor algorithms, strategically prioritizing promising documents for reranking based on document similarity. Experimental results demonstrate substantial performance improvements across multiple benchmarks: 3.5 points on BRIGHT, 2.9 on FollowIR, and 5.1 on M-BEIR, all within a constrained reranker budget of 100 documents. Our analysis suggests that, given a fixed pair of embedding and reranker models, strategically selecting documents to rerank can significantly improve retrieval accuracy under limited reranker budget.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.07163,
  title  = {Beyond Sequential Reranking: Reranker-Guided Search Improves Reasoning Intensive Retrieval},
  author = {Haike Xu and Tong Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.07163},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:27:22.563Z