Zhentao he
Author directory2026
SHIFT: Self-reconstruction Harnesses Implicit Fine-grained Thinking for Retrieval
Yuxiao Luo | Da Li | Mingjie Zhang | Zhentao he | Shikun Zhang | Wei Ye
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yuxiao Luo | Da Li | Mingjie Zhang | Zhentao he | Shikun Zhang | Wei Ye
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
LLM-based retrievers have become a fundamental component of modern information retrieval systems. The paradigm of ”rewrite-then-retrieve” introduces explicit reasoning before retrieval. In addition, implicit-reasoning retrievers such as GIRCSE and LaSER improve efficiency by replacing explicit reasoning with soft tokens. Although these methods demonstrated competitive performance on reasoning-intensive retrieval benchmarks, they struggle to address the mismatch between the objectives of retrieval and generation. In this work, we propose SHIFT (**S**elf-reconstruction **H**arnesses **I**mplicit **F**ine-grained **T**hinking for Retrieval), a retrieval training framework based on LLMs. Firstly, we transfer LLMs into reasoning-efficient retrievers with residual projection and task-oriented bidirectional attention aggregation in the latent space. Secondly, we alleviate the mismatch between contrastive learning and implicit reasoning using fine-grained next-token-prediction-based reconstruction. Extensive experiments on reasoning-intensive retrieval benchmarks show that SHIFT consistently outperforms other widely used retrievers. We also carried out a detailed analysis to illustrate how our method works.