Jincheng Feng
Author directory2026
SumRank: Aligning Summarization Models for Long-Document Listwise Reranking
Jincheng Feng | Wenhan Liu | Zhicheng Dou
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jincheng Feng | Wenhan Liu | Zhicheng Dou
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior performance in listwise passage reranking task. However, directly applying them to rank long-form documents introduces both effectiveness and efficiency issues due to the substantially increased context length. To address this challenge, we propose a per-document summarization model SumRank, aligned with downstream listwise reranking, to compress long-form documents into concise rank-aligned summaries before the final listwise reranking stage. To develop our summarization model SumRank, we introduce a three-stage training pipeline consisting of cold-start Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), specialized Reinforcement Learning (RL) data construction, and rank-driven alignment via RL. This paradigm aligns the SumRank with downstream ranking objectives to preserve crucial relevance signals. We conduct extensive experiments on both in-domain (ID) benchmark datasets from the TREC Deep Learning tracks and out-of-domain (OOD) datasets from the BEIR benchmark. Results show that our lightweight SumRank model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) ranking performance while significantly improving efficiency by reducing both summarization overhead and reranking complexity.