CompRank: Efficient LLM Reranking via Token-Level Compression and Decoding-Free Scoring

Large language model (LLM) rerankers have become an important component of modern retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, but their high computational cost limits their applicability to long candidate lists. In this paper, we propose CompRank, a token-efficient reranking framework that reduces redundant computation by aligning reranker design with the sparsity of ranking signals. CompRank decouples document representations from candidate order and query context, enabling reusable document-side states; applies segment-wise token compression to reduce query--document interaction cost; and introduces a CopyNet-style objective that directly aligns attention-based document scoring with training supervision. Experiments on seven BEIR datasets show that CompRank achieves strong reranking performance while retaining only 10.2% of document tokens, reaching an average NDCG@10 of 39.2 compared with 39.7 under full-token attention. Further scaling experiments on TREC-COVID show that CompRank remains stable when evaluated on candidate lists of up to 500 documents after training on 30-document lists, while achieving 4.9×--9.5× end-to-end speedup over generation-based listwise reranking and approximately 1.3× speedup over the full-token CompRank variant. These results suggest that token-level compression and decoding-free attention scoring provide an effective path toward scalable LLM-based reranking.