Large language models (LLMs) have become a powerful tool for listwise relevance ranking, which can improve web search by comparing retrieved passages jointly. However, processing every candidate verbatim and generating a permutation autoregressively can make inference costly, every candidate must be serialized verbatim into the prompt and the input therefore grows linearly with both the number and the length of the passages. While sliding-window ranking handles context limits through repeated re-encoding of overlapping blocks, hard compression techniques sacrifice the fine-grained details required for accurate discriminative judgment. To better understand and mitigate this trade-off, we conduct a comprehensive study of soft compression for LLM-based listwise ranking. Our findings reveal that a vanilla gist representation is ill-suited to ranking for two reasons: strictly causal encoding weakens how thoroughly each gist token absorbs its passage, and the representation is never trained to expose the relative-preference structure that separates closely competing candidates. To this end, we propose GistRank, a three-stage training framework that equips a large language model with gist-compressed passage representations by learning faithful gist tokens under a semi-bidirectional attention scheme, instilling discriminative comparison through pairwise training, and adapting the model to the listwise objective. GistRank collapses each passage into only $K{=}4$ gist tokens, this gives 14$\times$ speedups over one-shot full-text ranking while reaching 59.17 average nDCG@10 over TREC DL19/20 and five BEIR subsets within 0.89 of the strongest full-context baseline. Overall, GistRank provides an effective means to enhance efficiency for searches in real-world environments.
Wenhan Liu, Xinyu Ma Baidu, Weiwei Sun Carnegie Mellon University, Yutao Zhu, Yuchen Li Baidu Inc., Dawei Yin Baidu, Zhicheng Dou Renmin University of China
Large Language Model (LLM) based listwise ranking has shown superior performance in many passage ranking tasks. With the development of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), many studies have demonstrated that step-by-step reasoning during test-time helps improve listwise ranking performance. However, due to the scarcity of reasoning-intensive training data, existing rerankers perform poorly in many complex ranking scenarios, and the ranking ability of reasoning-intensive rerankers remains largely underdeveloped. In this paper, we first propose an automated reasoning-intensive training data synthesis framework, which sources training queries and passages from diverse domains and applies DeepSeek-R1 to generate high-quality training labels. To empower the listwise reranker with strong reasoning ability, we further propose a two-stage training approach, which includes a cold-start supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage and a reinforcement learning (RL) stage. During the RL stage, we design a novel multi-view ranking reward tailored to the multi-turn nature of listwise ranking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our trained reasoning-intensive reranker ReasonRank outperforms existing baselines significantly and also achieves much lower latency than the pointwise reranker.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表