Learning from Emptiness: De-biasing Listwise Rerankers with Content-Agnostic Probability Calibration

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10150v1
• Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:47:22 GMT
• Title: Learning from Emptiness: De-biasing Listwise Rerankers with Content-Agnostic Probability Calibration
• Abstract summary: CapCal is a training-free framework that mechanically decouples positional bias from ranking decisions.<n>It achieves superior performance among training-free methods while preserving single-pass efficiency.
• Score: 76.08899010904652
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Generative listwise reranking leverages global context for superior retrieval but is plagued by intrinsic position bias, where models exhibit structural sensitivity to input order independent of relevance. Existing mitigations present a dilemma: inference-time aggregation incurs prohibitive latency, while training-based methods often fail to eradicate ingrained priors, particularly in compact models. To resolve this dilemma, we propose CapCal (Content-Agnostic Probability Calibration), a training-free framework that mechanically decouples positional bias from ranking decisions. By estimating the bias distribution via content-free placeholders, CapCal rectifies output logits through an entropy-adaptive contrastive mechanism. Evaluations across 10 benchmarks confirm that CapCal achieves superior performance among training-free methods while preserving single-pass efficiency. Notably, it unlocks the latent potential of lightweight models (e.g., 0.6B), delivering absolute NDCG gains exceeding 10 points and outperforming both permutation-based aggregation and data-augmentation baselines.

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