Papers › ReFIT: Relevance Feedback from a Reranker during Inference
ReFIT: Relevance Feedback from a Reranker during Inference
Revanth Gangi Reddy, Pradeep Dasigi, Md Arafat Sultan, Arman Cohan, Avirup Sil, Heng Ji, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Retrieve-and-rerank is a prevalent framework in neural information retrieval, wherein a bi-encoder network initially retrieves a pre-defined number of candidates (e.g., K=100), which are then reranked by a more powerful cross-encoder model. While the reranker often yields improved candidate scores compared to the retriever, its scope is confined to only the top K retrieved candidates. As a result, the reranker cannot improve retrieval performance in terms of Recall@K. In this work, we propose to leverage the reranker to improve recall by making it provide relevance feedback to the retriever at inference time. Specifically, given a test instance during inference, we distill the reranker's predictions for that instance into the retriever's query representation using a lightweight update mechanism. The aim of the distillation loss is to align the retriever's candidate scores more closely with those produced by the reranker. The algorithm then proceeds by executing a second retrieval step using the updated query vector. We empirically demonstrate that this method, applicable to various retrieve-and-rerank frameworks, substantially enhances retrieval recall across multiple domains, languages, and modalities.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections