$\text{E}^2\text{Rank}$: Your Text Embedding can Also be an Effective and Efficient Listwise Reranker

Qi Liu, Yanzhao Zhang, Mingxin Li, Dingkun Long, Pengjun Xie, Jiaxin Mao

Keywords: Text Embedding, Reranking, Large Language Models

Abstract: Text embedding models serve as a fundamental component in real-world search applications. By mapping queries and documents into a shared embedding space, they deliver competitive retrieval performance with high efficiency. However, their ranking fidelity remains limited compared to dedicated rerankers, especially recent LLM-based listwise rerankers, which capture fine-grained query–document and document–document interactions. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective unified framework $\text{E}^2\text{Rank}$, means \textbf{E}fficient \textbf{E}mbedding-based \textbf{Rank}ing (also means \textbf{Embedding-to-Rank}), which extends a single text embedding model to perform both high-quality retrieval and listwise reranking through continued training under a listwise ranking objective, thereby achieving strong effectiveness with remarkable efficiency. By applying cosine similarity between the query and document embeddings as a unified ranking function, the listwise ranking prompt, which is constructed from the original query and its candidate documents, serves as an enhanced query enriched with signals from the top-K documents, akin to pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) in traditional retrieval models. This design preserves the efficiency and representational quality of the base embedding model while significantly improving its reranking performance. Empirically, $\text{E}^2\text{Rank}$ achieves state-of-the-art results on the BEIR reranking benchmark and demonstrates competitive performance on the reasoning-intensive BRIGHT benchmark, with very low reranking latency. We also show that the ranking training process improves embedding performance on the MTEB benchmark. Our findings indicate that a single embedding model can effectively unify retrieval and reranking, offering both computational efficiency and competitive ranking accuracy.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

Submission Number: 11935