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Abstract:Common approaches to reduce the computational overhead of reranking models include identifying a candidate set of documents for reranking or constructing comparison graphs to minimize redundant comparisons. For pointwise rankers, determining a candidate set typically involves estimating a query-dependent cutoff based on the scores of the top-ranked documents. In contrast, comparison graphs for listwise approaches are often derived using heuristics, such as propagating local comparisons within sliding windows in a bottom-up fashion or reducing comparisons via pivot-based strategies in a top-down manner. In this work, we argue that restricting these processes to existing documents in the collection is unnecessary. Instead, we propose leveraging the generative capabilities of large language models to synthesize a pseudo-relevant document for a given query. We then adapt existing reranking approaches and also propose a novel parallel reranking approach to leverage this LLM-generated document as a pivot. Our experiments demonstrate that using LLM-generated pivots for ranked list truncation reduces the number of pointwise ranker inferences by up to 66\%. In both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, we observe speedups of up to $2.95\times$ in listwise reranking, while maintaining comparable or improved retrieval effectiveness.

Submission history

From: Nilanjan Sinhababu [view email]
[v1] Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:59:54 UTC (897 KB)
[v2] Thu, 28 May 2026 08:58:53 UTC (2,236 KB)
[v3] Thu, 27 Aug 2026 09:00:06 UTC (1,928 KB)