Efficiency-Effectiveness Reranking FLOPs for LLM-based Rerankers
Authors: name: Zhiyuan Peng; name: Ting-ruen Wei; name: Tingyu Song; name: Yilun Zhao; name: Yi Fang
Published: 2025-07-08 17:56:28

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been applied to reranking tasks in
information retrieval, achieving strong performance. However, their high
computational demands often hinder practical deployment. Existing studies
evaluate the efficiency of LLM-based rerankers using proxy metrics such as
latency, the number of forward passes, input tokens, and output tokens.
However, these metrics depend on hardware and running-time choices (\eg
parallel or not, batch size, etc), and often fail to account for model size,
making it difficult to interpret and obscuring the evaluation of the
efficiency-effectiveness tradeoff. To address this issue, we propose
E2R-FLOPs, for LLM-based rerankers: ranking metrics per
PetaFLOP (RPP) for relevance per compute and queries per PetaFLOP (QPP) for
hardware-agnostic throughput. Companied with the new metrics, an interpretable
FLOPs estimator is built to estimate the FLOPs of an LLM-based reranker even
without running any experiments. Based on the proposed metrics, we conduct
comprehensive experiments to evaluate a wide range of LLM-based rerankers with
different architecture, studying the efficiency-effectiveness trade-off and
bringing this issue to the attention of the research community.