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Abstract - KaLM-Reranker-V1: Fast but Not Late Interaction for Compressed Document Reranking
As retrieval systems scale, high-quality reranking becomes increasingly important. However, most existing rerankers, whether encoder-based or decoder-based, jointly encode the query and passage, tightly coupling their computation and limiting deployment efficiency as well as flexibility. We present KaLM-Reranker-V1, a fast but not late-interaction (FBNL) reranker that decouples query and passage computation while retaining expressive relevance modeling. Built on an encoder-decoder architecture, KaLM-Reranker-V1 uses the encoder to pre-encode passages with Matryoshka embedding pooling, while the decoder models the system instruction, user instruction, and query intent; cross-attention then captures relevance between the query context and passage representations. This design makes KaLM-Reranker-V1 efficient through decoupled passage encoding, yet not late interaction, by preserving rich relevance modeling through cross-attention. We instantiate KaLM-Reranker-V1 in three sizes, Nano, Small, and Large, with 0.27B, 1B, and 4B activated parameters, respectively. Extensive experiments on BEIR, MIRACL, and LMEB demonstrate that KaLM-Reranker-V1 achieves strong reranking performance with superior efficiency. On BEIR, KaLM-Reranker-V1 achieves state-of-the-art performance, on par with strong industrial models such as the Qwen3-Reranker series; on MIRACL, despite not being extensively trained on multilingual data, KaLM-Reranker-V1 still shows excellent reranking performance. Moreover, on LMEB, reranking models demonstrate a clear advantage, with even the 0.27B Nano model remaining competitive with 7-12B embedding models.
KaLM-Reranker-V1:快速但不晚交互的压缩文档重排序 /
KaLM-Reranker-V1: Fast but Not Late Interaction for Compressed Document Reranking
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文提出了一种名为KaLM-Reranker-V1的新型文档重排序模型,通过将查询和文档的计算过程分离(编码器预编码文档,解码器处理查询意图),再使用交叉注意力机制捕捉相关性,从而在保持高效推理速度的同时,实现了与顶尖模型相当的重排序性能,并且小模型也能达到大型嵌入模型的效果。