HYRR: Hybrid Infused Reranking for Passage Retrieval

Jing Lu, Keith B. Hall, Ji Ma, Jianmo Ni

Abstract: Existing passage retrieval systems typically adopt a two-stage retrieve-then-rerank pipeline. To obtain an effective reranking model, many prior works have focused on improving the model architectures, such as leveraging powerful pretrained large language models (LLM) and designing better objective functions. However, less attention has been paid to the issue of collecting high-quality training data. In this paper, we propose HYRR, a framework for training robust reranking models. Specifically, we propose a simple but effective approach to select training data using hybrid retrievers. Our experiments show that the rerankers trained with HYRR are robust to different first-stage retrievers. Moreover, evaluations using MS MARCO and BEIR data sets demonstrate our proposed framework effectively generalizes to both supervised and zero-shot retrieval settings.