Assessing the Benefits of Model Ensembles in Neural Re-ranking for Passage Retrieval

Luís Borges, Bruno Martins, Jamie Callan

Abstract: Our work aimed at experimentally assessing the benefits of model ensembling within the context of neural methods for passage re-ranking. Starting from relatively standard neural models, we use a previous technique named Fast Geometric Ensembling to generate multiple model instances from particular training schedules, then focusing or attention on different types of approaches for combining the results from the multiple model instances (e.g., averaging the ranking scores, using fusion methods from the IR literature, or using supervised learning-to-rank). Tests with the MS-MARCO dataset show that model ensembling can indeed benefit the ranking quality, particularly with supervised learning-to-rank although also with unsupervised rank aggregation.