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Good Ranks Follow Good Answers: Unsupervised Answer-Driven Reranking for Multimodal Document QA

sigir26-140 · Full research paper · Keyu Zhu, Shuanghong Shen, Xianquan Wang, Kai Zhang, Shijin Wang, Qi Liu, Zhenya Huang
Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain · 50% Ranking Distillation and Adaptation · 50%
Abstract

Multimodal Document Question Answering (MDQA) systems commonly follow a retrieve-then-answer paradigm; however, the retrieval stage often introduces substantial noise, making an effective reranking component indispensable. Existing reranker training frameworks in MDQA rely predominantly on proxy supervision derived from human annotations or large language model (LLM) outputs, which are frequently noisy and, more critically, misaligned with downstream answer quality. To overcome this limitation, we propose AD-Reranker, a novel framework that shifts reranker training from proxy imitation to answer-driven utility optimization. Specifically, we reformulate the reranker as an environment-grounded agent that interacts with a downstream reader, modeled as a deterministic environment. We further design a composite reward function that integrates answer correctness, thereby explicitly incentivizing ranking strategies aligned with downstream task performance. To optimize the agent, we adopt Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), enabling stable and effective group-wise policy learning. Empirical results demonstrate that AD-Reranker achieves superior reranking quality and an optimal accuracy-efficiency trade-off. When integrated into standard MDQA pipelines, AD-Reranker improves accuracy by 1.9%–5.0% while reducing the reader's context token consumption by 15%–52%, providing strong evidence for the effectiveness of answer-driven reranker training.

Assigned reviewers

#ReviewerMatchWhy (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy)
1 Idan Szpektor
54
72 Will My Question Be Answered? Predicting "Question Answerability" in Community Question-Answering Sites (2013) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
72 SIGIR 2016 Workshop WebQA II: Web Question Answering Beyond Factoids (2016) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
72 Learning from the past: answering new questions with past answers (2012) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
2 Yuchen Li 0006
47
68 S2phere: Semi-Supervised Pre-training for Web Search over Heterogeneous Learning to Rank Data (2023) Web-Scale Learning to Rank
49 ReasonRank: Empowering Passage Ranking with Strong Reasoning Ability (2026) LLM-Based Reranking
46 M2oERank: Multi-Objective Mixture-of-Experts Enhanced Ranking for Satisfaction-Oriented Web Search (2025) Web-Scale Learning to Rank
3 Shuaiqiang Wang
44
53 Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents (2023) Text Embedding and Representation Learning
46 GS2P: a generative pre-trained learning to rank model with over-parameterization for web-scale search (2024) Web-Scale Learning to Rank
46 GS2P: A Generative Pre-trained Learning to Rank Model with Over-parameterization for Web-Scale Search (Extended Abstract) (2024) Web-Scale Learning to Rank

Area chair

Area chairMatch
Zhijing Wu 0001 44
Area-chair candidates (5)
Kam-Fai Wong COI: co-author 446 papers
Zhijing Wu 0001 assigned 449 papers
Chenyan Xiong 4115 papers
Jun Xu 0001 402 papers
Xiaoxue Zang 404 papers

Candidates from the panel ranked by match score

#ReviewerMatchLoadWhy
1 Idan Szpektor assigned 54 3
72 Will My Question Be Answered? Predicting "Question Answerability" in Community Question-Answering Sites (2013) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
72 SIGIR 2016 Workshop WebQA II: Web Question Answering Beyond Factoids (2016) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
2 Jing Liu 0022 51 3
72 A Regularized Competition Model for Question Difficulty Estimation in Community Question Answering Services (2014) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
68 Investigating the Factual Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models with Retrieval Augmentation (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
3 Jurek Leonhardt 48 3
72 Data Augmentation for Sample Efficient and Robust Document Ranking (2024) Ranking Distillation and Adaptation
43 Extractive Explanations for Interpretable Text Ranking (2023) Cross-Encoder and Neural Reranking
4 Farzad Shami 47 3
72 From Single to Multi-agent Reasoning: Advancing GeneGPT for Genomics QA (2026) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
35 Benchmarking Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Validation (2026) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
5 Chen Zhao 0013 47 3
72 A dataset and baselines for sequential open-domain question answering (2018) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
63 Distantly-Supervised Dense Retrieval Enables Open-Domain Question Answering without Evidence Annotation (2021) Dense Bi-Encoder Training and Representation Learning
6 Yuchen Li 0006 assigned 47 3
68 S2phere: Semi-Supervised Pre-training for Web Search over Heterogeneous Learning to Rank Data (2023) Web-Scale Learning to Rank
49 ReasonRank: Empowering Passage Ranking with Strong Reasoning Ability (2026) LLM-Based Reranking
7 Adam Jatowt 46 3
68 ArchivalQA: A Large-scale Benchmark Dataset for Open-Domain Question Answering over Historical News Collections (2022) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
50 BracketRank: Large Language Model Document Ranking via Reasoning-based Competitive Elimination (2026) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
9 Jiapu Wang 44 3
67 Large-Small Model Synergy with Multimodal Fine-Grained Heuristics for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (2025) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
57 Decomposing and Revising What Language Models Generate (2025) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning
10 Shuaiqiang Wang assigned 44 3
53 Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents (2023) Text Embedding and Representation Learning
46 GS2P: a generative pre-trained learning to rank model with over-parameterization for web-scale search (2024) Web-Scale Learning to Rank
12 Kaixin Ma 43 3
74 Chain-of-Skills: A Configurable Model for Open-Domain Question Answering (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
71 Open Domain Question Answering with A Unified Knowledge Interface (2022) Multimodal and Graph RAG
13 Jinheon Baek 43 3
70 Realistic Conversational Question Answering with Answer Selection based on Calibrated Confidence and Uncertainty Measurement (2023) Conversational Search and Retrieval
70 Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Small Language Models in Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
14 Mariano Barone 43 3
66 A Multilingual Multimodal Medical Examination Dataset for Visual Question Answering in Healthcare (2025) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
64 SOLVE-Med: Specialized Orchestration for Leading Vertical Experts Across Medical Specialties (2025) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
15 Falk Scholer 43 3
74 Ranking Documents by Answer-Passage Quality (2018) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
74 Document Summarization for Answering Non-Factoid Queries (2018) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
16 Shengyao Zhuang 43 3
58 Rank-R1: Enhancing Reasoning in LLM-based Document Rerankers via Reinforcement Learning (2026) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
50 R2LLMs: Retrieval and Ranking with LLMs (2025) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
17 Xinyu Ma 0001 COI: co-author 43 3
61 Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents (2023) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
46 ReasonRank: Empowering Passage Ranking with Strong Reasoning Ability (2026) LLM-Based Reranking
18 Zhen Qin 0001 42 3
72 Learning List-Level Domain-Invariant Representations for Ranking (2023) Ranking Distillation and Adaptation
68 Multi-Task Learning for Email Search Ranking with Auxiliary Query Clustering (2018) Domain-Specific and Structured Retrieval
19 Weiwei Sun 0001 COI: co-author 42 3
61 Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents (2023) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
50 TourRank: Utilizing Large Language Models for Documents Ranking with a Tournament-Inspired Strategy (2025) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
20 Andrew Parry 42 3
66 "In-Context Learning" or: How I learned to stop worrying and love "Applied Information Retrieval" (2024) Sparse and Dense Retrieval Encoders
43 Optimal Re-Ranking Depth (2026) Query Performance Prediction
21 Archiki Prasad 42 3
72 MeetingQA: Extractive Question-Answering on Meeting Transcripts (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
67 PRInTS: Reward Modeling for Long-Horizon Information Seeking (2026) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision
22 Gustavo Penha 42 3
72 Curriculum Learning Strategies for IR (2020) Ranking Distillation and Adaptation
49 Online learning to rank for sequential music recommendation (2019) Search and Recommendation Integration
23 Xinying Qian 41 3
45 Beyond Timestamps: Bridging Forward and Backward Reasoning in Temporal Numerical and Relational Understanding (2026) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
40 TimeR⁴ : Time-aware Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning
24 Ruqing Zhang 0001 41 3
44 CorpusBrain++: A Continual Generative Pre-Training Framework for Knowledge-Intensive Language Tasks (2026) Generative Retrieval
43 Boosting Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Generation-Augmented Retrieval: A Co-Training Approach (2025) Generative Retrieval
25 Xi Ye 0003 41 3
65 Query-Focused Retrieval Heads Improve Long-Context Reasoning and Re-ranking (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
45 Connecting Attributions and QA Model Behavior on Realistic Counterfactuals (2021) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
26 Ori Yoran 41 3
57 Making Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Robust to Irrelevant Context (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
48 Answering Questions by Meta-Reasoning over Multiple Chains of Thought (2023) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
27 Daiting Shi COI: co-author 41 3
49 TourRank: Utilizing Large Language Models for Documents Ranking with a Tournament-Inspired Strategy (2025) LLM-Based Reranking
45 A Question-Oriented Propagation Network for News Reading Comprehension (2022) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
28 Qinggang Zhang 41 3
45 Knapsack Optimization-Based Schema Linking for LLM-Based Text-to-SQL Generation (2026) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
45 Hierarchy-Aware Multi-Hop Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (2023) Knowledge Graph Question Answering
30 Xiao Wang 0043 41 3
44 Improving zero-shot retrieval using dense external expansion (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion
42 Neural Pseudo-Relevance Feedback Models for Sparse and Dense Retrieval (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion
31 Keping Bi 40 3
59 Towards Fully Exploiting LLM Internal States to Enhance Knowledge Boundary Perception (2025) Search Agents and LLM Reasoning › Others
46 Extracting search-focused key n-grams for relevance ranking in web search (2012) Web-Scale Learning to Rank
33 Corby Rosset 40 3
71 Axiomatic Preference Modeling for Longform Question Answering (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
45 Transformer-XH: Multi-Evidence Reasoning with eXtra Hop Attention (2020) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning
35 Negar Arabzadeh 40 3
44 Can QPP Choose the Right Query variant? Evaluating Query Variant Selection for RAG Pipelines (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
44 Enhanced Retrieval Effectiveness through Selective Query Generation (2024) Query Reformulation and Expansion