Lighting the Way for BRIGHT: Reproducible Baselines with Anserini, Pyserini, and RankLLM
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Retrieval benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) should reflect the long, reasoning-intensive queries typical of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We present a systematic study of BRIGHT, a reasoning-focused retrieval benchmark, along with strong, reproducible reference methods integrated into Anserini, Pyserini, and RankLLM. We evaluate lexical, sparse, dense, and fusion-based retrievers, as well as LLM rerankers, under long-query settings. In reproducing BRIGHT's lexical baseline, we identify a key under-documented detail: query-side BM25 (BM25Q), which applies BM25 weighting to the query itself. On long, multi-sentence queries, BM25Q consistently outperforms standard BM25, making it the strongest lexical baseline for reasoning-oriented retrieval. We further audit the BRIGHT corpus, uncovering data quality issues that impact evaluation, and offer mitigation. Finally, we study the generalizability of BM25Q across five additional benchmarks, finding its gains largely specific to BRIGHT, while fusion with standard BM25 provides the most consistent improvements across datasets.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.088 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".