Query-focused and Memory-aware Reranker for Long Context Processing 文章

arXiv:2602.12192v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Built upon the existing analysis of retrieval heads in large language models, we propose an alternative reranking framework that trains models to estimate passage-query relevance using the attention scores of selected heads. This approach provides a listwise solution that leverages the holistic information within the entire candidate shortlist during ranking. At the same time, it naturally produces continuous relevance scores, enabling training on arbitrary retrieval datasets without requiring Likert-scale supervision. Our framework is lightweight and effective, requiring only small-scale models, such as 3B parameters, to achieve strong performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art pointwise and listwise rerankers across multiple domains, including Wikipedia and long narrative datasets.