Re$^3$Rank: Listwise Reranking with Reasoning-Conditioned Retrieval Heads

Abstract

Attention-based rerankers score each candidate by the attention mass that retrieval heads route to it from the question, but the question, serving as a fixed query, carries limited information for locating relevant evidence. We propose Re$^3$Rank, a listwise reranker built on reasoning-conditioned retrieval heads (RRHeads). A generator first writes a reasoning trace over the question and the candidates, and a scorer then uses the trace tokens as the attention query of a few selected RRHeads, reading relevance as continuous scores. We present a straight-through estimator to propagate the ranking loss through the discrete trace, so that the generator and the scorer can be trained jointly for ranking. Averaged over 9 benchmarks, Re$^3$Rank outperforms 11 baseline rerankers: our 4B variant exceeds the strongest baseline by 3.11 NDCG@10 points on average, and even our 0.6B variant surpasses rerankers with up to 32B parameters.