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arXiv · 2502.18418

Rank1: Test-Time Compute for Reranking in Information Retrieval

Orion Weller·Kathryn Ricci·Eugene Yang·Andrew Yates·Dawn Lawrie·Benjamin Van Durme
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Abstract

We introduce Rank1, the first reranking model trained to take advantage of test-time compute. Rank1 demonstrates the applicability within retrieval of using a reasoning language model (i.e. OpenAI's o1, Deepseek's R1, etc.) for distillation in order to rapidly improve the performance of a smaller model. We gather and open-source a dataset of more than 600,000 examples of R1 reasoning traces from queries and passages in MS MARCO. Models trained on this dataset show: (1) state-of-the-art performance on advanced reasoning and instruction following datasets; (2) work remarkably well out of distribution due to the ability to respond to user-input prompts; and (3) have explainable reasoning chains that can be given to users or RAG-based systems. Further, we demonstrate that quantized versions of these models retain strong performance while using less compute/memory. Overall, Rank1 shows that test-time compute allows for a fundamentally new type of explainable and performant reranker model for search.

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Orion Weller, Kathryn Ricci, Eugene Yang, Andrew Yates, Dawn Lawrie, Benjamin Van Durme. 2025-02-25. Rank1: Test-Time Compute for Reranking in Information Retrieval. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18418

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