Learning to Route Queries to Heads for Attention-based Re-ranking with Large Language Models

Decoding-free reranking methods that read relevance signals directly from LLM attention weights offer significant latency advantages over autoregressive approaches, yet suffer from attention score homogenization: middle-context documents receive near-identical scores, destroying the fine-grained distinctions required for ranking. We propose HeadRank, a framework that lifts preference optimization from discrete token space into the continuous attention domain through entropy-regularized head selection, hard adjacent-level preference pairs, and a distribution regularizer that jointly sharpen discriminability in the homogenized middle zone. Depth truncation at the deepest selected layer further reduces inference to $\mathcal{O}(1)$ forward passes. Across 14 benchmarks on three Qwen3 scales (0.6B--4B) using only 211 training queries, HeadRank achieves the highest average NDCG@10 at every scale, outperforming both generative and decoding-free baselines on the majority of benchmarks with 100% formatting success. At 4B, 57.4% of relevant middle-zone documents reach the top quartile versus 14.2% for irrelevant ones -- a 43-percentage-point selectivity gap that demonstrates the effectiveness of attention-space preference alignment for listwise reranking.

Recent studies increasingly explore Large Language Models (LLMs) as a new paradigm for recommendation systems due to their scalability and world knowledge. However, existing work has three key limitations: (1) most efforts focus on retrieval and ranking, while the reranking phase, critical for refining final recommendations, is largely overlooked; (2) LLMs are typically used in zero-shot or supervised fine-tuning settings, leaving their reasoning abilities, especially those enhanced through reinforcement learning (RL) and high-quality reasoning data, underexploited; (3) items are commonly represented by non-semantic IDs, creating major scalability challenges in industrial systems with billions of identifiers. To address these gaps, we propose the Generative Reasoning Reranker (GR2), an end-to-end framework with a three-stage training pipeline tailored for reranking. First, a pretrained LLM is mid-trained on semantic IDs encoded from non-semantic IDs via a tokenizer achieving $\ge$99% uniqueness. Next, a stronger larger-scale LLM generates high-quality reasoning traces through carefully designed prompting and rejection sampling, which are used for supervised fine-tuning to impart foundational reasoning skills. Finally, we apply Decoupled Clip and Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO), enabling scalable RL supervision with verifiable rewards designed specifically for reranking. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate GR2's effectiveness: it surpasses the state-of-the-art OneRec-Think by 2.4% in Recall@5 and 1.3% in NDCG@5. Ablations confirm that advanced reasoning traces yield substantial gains across metrics. We further find that RL reward design is crucial in reranking: LLMs tend to exploit reward hacking by preserving item order, motivating conditional verifiable rewards to mitigate this behavior and optimize reranking performance.

As retrieval systems scale, effective and efficient reranking becomes increasingly important. However, most existing encoder- and decoder-based rerankers jointly process every query--passage pair, tightly coupling their online computation and limiting deployment efficiency and 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 pre-encodes passages using Matryoshka embedding pooling, while its decoder models system and user instructions together with query intent; cross-attention then captures fine-grained relevance between the resulting query context and passage representations. Together, these designs offer four key advantages: (i) efficiency from offline passage encoding, (ii) expressiveness from cross-attention, (iii) compactness from Matryoshka embedding pooling, and (iv) test-time compute through an adjustable compute budget. 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 strong reranking performance with superior efficiency. On BEIR and MIRACL, our models achieve competitive performance in multi-domain and multilingual reranking, on par with strong industrial rerankers such as the Qwen3/BGE-Reranker series. On LMEB-Dialogue, a compact embedding model paired with our Nano reranker, which has only 0.27B activated parameters, remains competitive with 7--12B embedding models. Data and models are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/KaLM-Embedding/lychee-kalm-reranker-and-jev.