Think Thrice Before Reranking: Multi-perspective Evidence and Reasoning Integration for Text Reranking

arXiv:2609.20131 · cs.IR, cs.CL · Submitted 2026-09-17 · Read on arXiv

cs.IR, cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-09-17

Updated: 2026-09-17

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Reasoning-based reranking with Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown promising improvements in text ranking.

Terminology

Abstract

Reasoning-based reranking with Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown promising improvements in text ranking. However, current methods predominantly rely on a single reasoning trajectory, resulting in rankings that are susceptible to reasoning errors and inherently constrained in modeling the multifaceted signals underlying document relevance. To resolve this dilemma, we propose MERIT-Rank(Multi-perspective Evidence and Reasoning Integration for Text Reranking), a framework that models complementary reasoning trajectories to improve reranking robustness. MERIT-Rank formulates a Multi-Trajectory Reasoning Space (MTRS) that evaluates query-document relevance from multiple perspectives and introduces a joint reranker that consolidates these reasoning paths into a unified ranking decision. We further develop Progressive Rank Policy Optimization (PRPO), a progressive training framework that stabilizes reasoning trajectories while continually improving ranking quality through staged optimization objectives. Experiments on both reasoning-intensive and traditional retrieval benchmarks show that MERIT-Rank consistently achieves superior performance over competitive baselines. The 4B model notably outperforms most 7B and even 32B rerankers on BRIGHT.

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