miniReranker: Efficient Multimodal Reranking through Visual Cache Reuse and Interaction Sparsity

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently shown strong potential as point-wise rerankers by directly modeling query--document relevance through next-token prediction. However, point-wise reranking suffers from substantial repeated computation across query--document pairs, while the causal structure of transformers allows only prefix segments to be reused via pre-caching. To address the misalignment of existing query-first and document-first formats with both VQA-style prompting and computation-aware reuse, we propose a textitvision-first formulation that improves both cache reuse efficiency and reranking performance. However, the remaining cost is still considerable and stems from three main sources: (1) textitmodel depth, for which we reduce active parameters via early exit; (2) textitcross-segment attention, which we restrict to a narrow interaction band across a few layers; and (3) textitvisual tokens, where we reduce the number of tokens via embedder-guided pruning. Together, these designs form miniReranker, which reduces reranking runtime to <1% of the dense implementation under high-reuse settings for a single query, while preserving >96% of the dense model performance.