AI & ML
LRanker: Scaling LLM Ranking to Millions of Candidates with Test-Time Scaling
arXiv cs.IR0 views
arXiv:2605.27810v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) offer strong semantic representations for ranking, but processing candidate texts within limited contexts and repeatedly invoking an LLM for candidate-level comparisons can be costly when candidate pools contain millions of items. We propose LRanker, a framework for scaling LLM ranking to millions of candidates with test-time scaling. The framework combines two complementary components. A candidate aggregation encoder summarizes offline candidate embeddings using K-means clustering and conditions the LLM on compact global candidate information; ranking then uses inner-product scores with cached candidate embeddings. A graph-based test-time scaling mechanism allocates additional inference computation to partition-conditioned query embeddings and ensembles their ranking scores. This separates the ability to score large candidate pools from the use of additional test-time computation to improve ranking quality. We evaluate LRanker on seven tasks across three scenarios in RBench, including a recommendation task with more than 6.8M candidates. Against the strongest baseline reported for each task, the relative MRR improvements in RBench-Large are 27.5%, 3.9%, 0.9%, and 8.9% on Rec-Movie, Rec-Toy, MS MARCO, and ESCI, respectively. On RBench-Small, the reported task scores improve by 26.7% on Rec-Music and 6.1% on Routing-Balance; on the 6.8M-candidate Rec-Clothing task, the improvement over Tiger is 27.0%. Ablations support the complementary contributions of candidate aggregation and test-time ensembling. These results demonstrate a practical approach to million-scale LLM ranking, with test-time computation providing an additional means of improving ranking effectiveness.
Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27810PreviousRole-Augmented Intent-Driven Generative Search Engine OptimizationNextTokenMinds: Pretrained User Tokens and Embeddings for User Understanding in Large Recommender Systems
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