ProRank: Prompt Warmup via Reinforcement Learning for Small Language Models Reranking

Abstract

Reranking is fundamental to information retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation, with recent Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly advancing reranking quality. Most current works rely on large-scale LLMs (>7B parameters), presenting high computational costs. Small Language Models (SLMs) offer a promising alternative because of computational efficiency. However, our preliminary quantitative analysis reveals key limitations of SLMs: their representation space is narrow, leading to reduced expressiveness, and they struggle with understanding task prompts without fine-tuning. To address these issues, we introduce a novel two-stage training approach, ProRank, for SLM-based document reranking. We propose using reinforcement learning to improve the understanding of task prompts. Additionally, we introduce fine-grained score learning to enhance representation expressiveness and further improve document reranking quality. Extensive experiments suggest that ProRank consistently outperforms both the most advanced open-source and proprietary reranking models. Notably, our 0.5B ProRank even surpasses powerful LLM reranking models on the BEIR benchmark, establishing that properly trained SLMs can achieve superior document reranking performance while maintaining computational efficiency.