When Vision Meets Texts in Listwise Reranking

Recent advancements in information retrieval have highlighted the potential of integrating visual and textual information, yet effective reranking for image-text documents remains challenging due to the modality gap and scarcity of aligned datasets. Meanwhile, existing approaches often rely on large models (7B--32B parameters) with reasoning-based distillation, incurring unnecessary computational overhead while primarily focusing on textual modalities. In this paper, we propose Rank-Nexus, a multimodal image-text document reranker that performs listwise qualitative reranking on retrieved lists incorporating both images and texts. To bridge the modality gap, we introduce a progressive cross-modal training strategy. We first train each modality separately: leveraging abundant text reranking data, we distill ranking knowledge into the text branch using GPT-4o as the teacher model. For images, where labeled data is scarce, we construct distilled pairs from multimodal large language model (MLLM) captions on image retrieval benchmarks. Subsequently, we train on a joint image-text reranking dataset. Rank-Nexus achieves outstanding performance on text reranking benchmarks (TREC, BEIR) and the challenging image reranking benchmarks (INQUIRE, MMDocIR), using only a lightweight 2B pretrained visual-language model. This efficient design ensures strong generalization across diverse multimodal scenarios without excessive parameters or reasoning overhead.