通过激活层面调控,让大模型更稳定地判断文档相关性。
RankSteer: Activation Steering for Pointwise LLM Ranking
- 在推理时通过投影干预激活空间中的三个方向,调节排序行为。
- 仅用少量锚点查询,在TREC DL 20和BEIR上显著提升排序效果。
- 揭示了模型内部相关性判断的几何结构,适合研究排序机制的学者。
大型语言模型(LLMs)在零样本排序任务中表现强劲,但其效果高度依赖提示设计,尤其是角色扮演类指令。已有分析表明,角色信号编码在与查询-文档表征分离的激活通道中,这为直接在激活层调控排序行为提供了可能。本文提出RankSteer,一种针对零样本点对式LLM排序的后处理激活调控框架。通过表征空间中三个解耦且可调控的方向——决策方向(映射隐藏状态到相关性得分)、证据方向(捕捉未被决策头利用的相关性信号)、角色方向(调节模型行为而不引入相关性信息),在推理阶段使用投影干预联合控制这些方向,从而校准排序行为,无需修改模型权重或显式进行跨文档比较。在TREC DL 20及多个BEIR基准上的实验表明,仅需少量锚点查询,RankSteer即可持续提升排序质量,证明点对式LLM排序器中仍有大量潜力未被开发。进一步的几何分析显示,调控通过稳定排序几何结构、减少分散度来提升性能,为理解LLM内部相关性判断机制提供了新视角。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong performance as zero-shot rankers, yet their effectiveness is highly sensitive to prompt formulation, particularly role-play instructions. Prior analyses suggest that role-related signals are encoded along activation channels that are largely separate from query-document representations, raising the possibility of steering ranking behavior directly at the activation level rather than through brittle prompt engineering. In this work, we propose RankSteer, a post-hoc activation steering framework for zero-shot pointwise LLM ranking. We characterize ranking behavior through three disentangled and steerable directions in representation space: a \textbf{decision direction} that maps hidden states to relevance scores, an \textbf{evidence direction} that captures relevance signals not directly exploited by the decision head, and a \textbf{role direction} that modulates model behavior without injecting relevance information. Using projection-based interventions at inference time, RankSteer jointly controls these directions to calibrate ranking behavior without modifying model weights or introducing explicit cross-document comparisons. Experiments on TREC DL 20 and multiple BEIR benchmarks show that RankSteer consistently improves ranking quality using only a small number of anchor queries, demonstrating that substantial ranking capacity remains under-utilized in pointwise LLM rankers. We further provide a geometric analysis revealing that steering improves ranking by stabilizing ranking geometry and reducing dispersion, offering new insight into how LLMs internally represent and calibrate relevance judgments.
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