Re-Rankers as Relevance Judges

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04455v1
• Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:02:59 GMT
• Title: Re-Rankers as Relevance Judges
• Authors: Chuan Meng, Jiqun Liu, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Fengran Mo, Jeff Dalton, Maarten de Rijke,
• Abstract summary: We reproduce re-rankers in a re-ranker-as-relevance-judge setup.<n>We perform experiments on TREC-DL 2019 to 2023 with 8 re-rankers from 3 families, ranging from 220M to 32B, and analyse the evaluation bias exhibited by re-ranker-based judges.
• Score: 65.37611299805856
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Using large language models (LLMs) to predict relevance judgments has shown promising results. Most studies treat this task as a distinct research line, e.g., focusing on prompt design for predicting relevance labels given a query and passage. However, predicting relevance judgments is essentially a form of relevance prediction, a problem extensively studied in tasks such as re-ranking. Despite this potential overlap, little research has explored reusing or adapting established re-ranking methods to predict relevance judgments, leading to potential resource waste and redundant development. To bridge this gap, we reproduce re-rankers in a re-ranker-as-relevance-judge setup. We design two adaptation strategies: (i) using binary tokens (e.g., "true" and "false") generated by a re-ranker as direct judgments, and (ii) converting continuous re-ranking scores into binary labels via thresholding. We perform extensive experiments on TREC-DL 2019 to 2023 with 8 re-rankers from 3 families, ranging from 220M to 32B, and analyse the evaluation bias exhibited by re-ranker-based judges. Results show that re-ranker-based relevance judges, under both strategies, can outperform UMBRELA, a state-of-the-art LLM-based relevance judge, in around 40% to 50% of the cases; they also exhibit strong self-preference towards their own and same-family re-rankers, as well as cross-family bias.

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