Enhancing Transformer-Based Rerankers with Synthetic Data and LLM-Based Supervision

Abstract

Effective document reranking is essential for improving search relevance across diverse applications. While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at reranking due to their deep semantic understanding and reasoning, their high computational cost makes them impractical for many real-world deployments. Fine-tuning smaller, task-specific models is a more efficient alternative but typically depends on scarce, manually labeled data. To overcome this, we propose a novel pipeline that eliminates the need for human-labeled query-document pairs. Our method uses LLMs to generate synthetic queries from domain-specific corpora and employs an LLM-based classifier to label positive and hard-negative pairs. This synthetic dataset is then used to fine-tune a smaller transformer model with contrastive learning using Localized Contrastive Estimation (LCE) loss. Experiments on the MedQuAD dataset show that our approach significantly boosts in-domain performance and generalizes well to out-of-domain tasks. By using LLMs for data generation and supervision rather than inference, we reduce computational costs while maintaining strong reranking capabilities.