LightOn-rerank-PW

About

What LightOn-rerank-PW is

[](https://lighton.ai) [](https://www.linkedin.com/company/lighton/) [](https://x.com/LightOnIO) 📝 Blog post About the LightOn-rerank family Production retrieval pipelines usually need two rerankers: one for text passages and one for visual documents (PDF pages, slides, scans). LightOn-rerank models are unified cross-encoder rerankers: a single model scores both text passages and document page images against a query, on top of any first-stage retriever (BM25, dense embeddings, or ColPali-family late-interaction models). The models are built on Qwen3.5 backbone (hybrid linear + full attention) and jointly fine-tuned on text and visual reranking data with mixed-modality batches (LoRA, merged into the released weights). Training data is English-only; French performance transfers zero-shot from the multilingual backbone. The family comes in two scoring flavours × three sizes (0.8B / 2B / 4B): - PW (pointwise): each candidate is scored independently. The model judges whether the document answers the query, and the score is logit("Yes") − logit("No"). One forward pass per candidate and no generation. - LW (listwise): generative listwise ranking, where 4 candidates are placed in a single prompt and the model generates a permutation ([2] [4] [1] [3]). Larger candidate pools are ranked with a sliding window (window 4, stride 2, bottom-to-top). Cross-document attention makes LW markedly stronger on hard visual reranking, and unlike pointwise scoring it keeps improving with backbone size. LightOn-rerank-PW-4B is the 4B pointwise member of the family. On visual reranking it ties the 2B pointwise model (59.80 vs 59.87 nDCG@10 on ViDoRe V3): direct evidence that independent Yes/No scoring is a capacity bottleneck that extra parameters cannot fix. On text BEIR, however, it posts the strongest scores in the family (50.19 decontaminated mean). For 4B-budget vision-heavy deployments, LightOn-rerank-LW-4B is +4.9 nDCG@10 at the same size. Results ViDoRe V3 (visual document reranking, 8 domains × EN/FR queries), overall nDCG@10, ColQwen2.5-v0.2 first stage, retrieve 100 / rerank 100. All models, including baselines, were re-evaluated under this same two-stage protocol, so numbers a

Summarised from the published model card. Read the full card on the HuggingFace links below.

Specifications

What it is

How it works

How language models work

Variants

Sizes & precisions

Open weights ship in several sizes and precisions. One page, all the variants — pick the one that fits your GPU. VRAM figures are estimates from model size.

Using it via the API

Call it like any OpenAI endpoint

Once AxForge deploys lighton-rerank-pw for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (lighton-rerank-pw below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)

$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"lighton-rerank-pw","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'

Details

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Licence

Open weights

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