ReFIT: Relevance Feedback from a Reranker during Inference

Abstract

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.