Challenge: Existing re-ranking methods for open-domain question answering are not domain- or task-specific.
Approach: They propose a simple and effective re-ranking method for improving passage retrieval in open-domain question answering.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms strong supervised models on open-domain questions and triviaQA datasets on top-1000 passages.

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Zero-shot Neural Passage Retrieval via Domain-targeted Synthetic Question Generation (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in neural retrieval have led to advancements on document, passage and knowledge-base benchmarks.
Approach: They propose an approach to zero-shot learning for passage retrieval that uses synthetic question generation to close this gap.
Outcome: The proposed approach can exceed term-based techniques on document retrieval benchmarks by using domain-targeted synthetic question generation.
Reader-Guided Passage Reranking for Open-Domain Question Answering (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Current open-domain question answering systems follow a Retriever-Reader architecture . current systems do not use a reranker, which reranked passages based on top predictions of the reader .
Approach: They propose a reader-guIDEd reranking method that reranked passages based on top predictions . they show that RIDER achieves 10 to 20 absolute gains in top-1 retrieval accuracy .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 10 to 20 gains in top-1 retrieval accuracy and 1 to 4 Exact Match gains without training.
DynRank: Improve Passage Retrieval with Dynamic Zero-Shot Prompting Based on Question Classification (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to enhancing passage retrieval rely on static prompts and pre-defined templates.
Approach: They propose a dynamic question classification framework for open-domain question-answering systems that generates contextually relevant prompts.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves passage retrieval in open-domain questionanswering systems by generating contextually relevant prompts.
Joint Inference of Retrieval and Generation for Passage Re-ranking (2024.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for re-ranking documents are sparse and do not require training.
Approach: They propose a method that optimizes mutual information between query and passage distributions by integrating cross-encoders and generative models in the re-ranking process.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms conventional re-rankers and language model scorers in open-domain QA retrieval settings and diverse retrieval benchmarks under zero-shot settings.
PaRaDe: Passage Ranking using Demonstrations with LLMs (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing studies show that large language models can be instructed to perform zero-shot passage re-ranking . Existing work like UPR demonstrate promising results for zero- shot ranking using LLMs .
Approach: They propose a demonstration selection strategy based on difficulty rather than semantic similarity . they propose to include only one demonstration in the prompt to improve re-ranking .
Outcome: The proposed method improves LLM-based re-ranking by adding one demonstration to the prompt.
Exploring efficient zero-shot synthetic dataset generation for Information Retrieval (2024.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large language models offer a new avenue of generating synthetic training data to train neural retrieval models for unlabelled data collections.
Approach: They propose a method to generate high-quality synthetic datasets using a small language model and a filtering mechanism to ensure the quality of generated questions.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms unsupervised retrieval methods such as BM25 and pretrained monoT5.
GENRA: Enhancing Zero-shot Retrieval with Rank Aggregation (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to perform zero-shot document retrieval, a process that typically consists of two steps: retrieving relevant documents, and re-ranking them based on their relevance to the query.
Approach: They propose a new approach to zero-shot document retrieval that incorporates rank aggregation to improve retrieval effectiveness.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves existing methods on benchmark datasets and shows that it can perform zero-shot retrieval.
Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to extracting answer from text are expensive to train and train.
Approach: They investigate how much models benefit from retrieving text passages . they obtain state-of-the-art results on the Natural Questions and TriviaQA open benchmarks ."
Outcome: The proposed model performs better when retrieving more passages than previously thought .
ASRank: Zero-Shot Re-Ranking with Answer Scent for Document Retrieval (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Retrieval-Augmented Generation models fail to rank the most relevant documents at the top . conventional retrieval methods fail to find the most important documents .
Approach: They propose a new method for scoring retrieved documents using zero-shot answer scent based on a pre-trained large language model to compute the likelihood of document-derived answers aligning with the answer scent.
Outcome: The proposed method improves top-1 retrieval accuracy on NQ, TriviaQA, WebQA, ArchivalQA, HotpotQA, and Entity Questions.
Expand, Rerank, and Retrieve: Query Reranking for Open-Domain Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Empirically, EAR improves top-5/20 accuracy by 3-8 and 5-10 points . dense retrievers are limited by their inability to perform semantic matching for relevant passages that have low lexical overlap with the query.
Approach: They propose a query expansion and reranking approach for improving passage retrieval with the application to open-domain question answering.
Outcome: Empirically, EAR improves top-5/20 accuracy by 3-8 and 5-10 points when compared to a vanilla query expansion model and a dense retrieval model.

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