jina-reranker-v3: Last but Not Late Interaction for Document Reranking
Authors: name: Feng Wang; name: Yuqing Li; name: Han Xiao
Published: 2025-09-29 17:23:54

Abstract: jina-reranker-v3 is a 0.6B parameter multilingual document reranker that
introduces a novel last but not late interaction. Unlike late interaction
models such as ColBERT that perform separate encoding followed by multi-vector
matching, our approach conducts causal self-attention between query and
documents within the same context window, enabling rich cross-document
interactions before extracting contextual embeddings from the last token of
each document. This compact architecture achieves state-of-the-art BEIR
performance with 61.94 nDCG@10 while being ten times smaller than generative
listwise rerankers.