Good Ranks Follow Good Answers: Unsupervised Answer-Driven Reranking for Multimodal Document QA
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
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Zhijing Wu 0001 | 44 |
Area-chair candidates (5)
| Kam-Fai Wong COI: co-author | 44 | 6 papers | |
| Zhijing Wu 0001 assigned | 44 | 9 papers | |
| Chenyan Xiong | 41 | 15 papers | |
| Jun Xu 0001 | 40 | 2 papers | |
| Xiaoxue Zang | 40 | 4 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |