---
license: mit
language:
- en
base_model:
- Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B-Base
library_name: transformers
pipeline_tag: text-classification
tags:
- retrieval
- document-retrieval
- information-retrieval
- routing
- RAG
- query-routing
- late-interaction
- lora
- peft
- baseline
datasets:
- emrekuruu/FinReport
- emrekuruu/FinSlides
- emrekuruu/FinQA
- emrekuruu/ConvFinQA
- emrekuruu/VQAonBD
- emrekuruu/TATDQA
- emrekuruu/ArxivQA
- emrekuruu/Wiki-ss
- emrekuruu/MP-DocVQA
- emrekuruu/SciQAG
- emrekuruu/DUDE
metrics:
- ndcg
---

# RetrievalRouter — Strategy-Selection Baseline

Adaptive routing **baseline** from **RetrievalRouter: Joint Modality and Architecture Selection
for Document Retrieval** (EMNLP 2026). This is **not** the RetrievalRouter method — it is the
prior strategy-selection approach of Arabzadeh et al. (CIKM 2021), extended to our
five-pipeline setting and trained under an identical pipeline for a controlled comparison.

- 📄 Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.25625
- 💻 Code: https://github.com/emrekuruu/retrieval-router
- 🤗 RetrievalRouter checkpoints: https://huggingface.co/collections/emrekuruu/retrieval-router

## Motivation

Retrieval pipelines differ in **modality** (search over text, or over page images) and
**architecture** (cheap dense search, or expensive late-interaction). The accurate ones are
slow; the fast ones miss evidence on hard documents. And which one fails depends on the query —
a text pipeline can't answer "what's the red curve in Figure 3?", but a multimodal one is
overkill for a plain factoid. Across 11 benchmarks, **no single pipeline wins on everything**.
RetrievalRouter picks the cheapest pipeline that can still answer each query, so easy queries
stay fast and hard ones still get the heavy pipeline.

## What this model is for

A **research baseline**, provided to reproduce the paper's comparisons. It trains a **hard-label
classifier**: each query is labeled with the cheapest pipeline that ranks a relevant page first
(BM25 when none do); at inference a probability threshold decides whether the query stays on BM25
or escalates to the top-scoring neural pipeline. It differs from RetrievalRouter only in the
**training signal** — hard labels + cross-entropy here, versus a soft reward vector + KL for
RetrievalRouter. Everything else (encoder, LoRA, pooling, head, split, optimizer, schedule) is
shared, so any difference reflects the training signal alone. For deployment, prefer the
[RetrievalRouter checkpoints](https://huggingface.co/collections/emrekuruu/retrieval-router),
which dominate this baseline on the accuracy–latency frontier.

## Routing arms

| Index | Arm (config name) | Paper name | Modality | Architecture |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | `MULTIMODAL_RERANK` | MM-Rerank | Multimodal | Dense → late-interaction rerank |
| 1 | `MULTIMODAL-SINGLE` | MM-Dense | Multimodal | Single-vector dense |
| 2 | `TEXT_RERANK` | Text-Rerank | Text | Dense → late-interaction rerank |
| 3 | `TEXT-SINGLE` | Text-Dense | Text | Single-vector dense |
| 4 | `BM25` | BM25 | Text | Lexical |

## Architecture

Identical to the RetrievalRouter checkpoints:
[Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B-Base](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B-Base) encoder + LoRA (merged), mean
pooling → 1024-d, single linear head over the five arms. Custom modeling code loads via
`trust_remote_code=True`.

## Usage

```python
import torch
from transformers import AutoModel, AutoTokenizer

repo = "emrekuruu/RetrievalRouter_Baseline"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(repo, trust_remote_code=True)
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained(repo, trust_remote_code=True).eval()

inputs = tokenizer("In figure 3, what does the red dashed curve represent?",
                   return_tensors="pt", truncation=True, max_length=128)
with torch.no_grad():
    logits = model(**inputs)["logits"]              # shape [1, 5]
arm = model.config.strategy_names[logits.softmax(-1).argmax(-1).item()]
print(arm)   # e.g. "MULTIMODAL_RERANK" -> run that pipeline for this query
```

The router returns **which retrieval pipeline to run**, not documents. You then execute the
selected pipeline against your own indices.

## Citation

If you use this baseline, please cite both the RetrievalRouter paper and the original
strategy-selection method it is based on:

```bibtex
@misc{kuru2026retrievalrouterjointmodalityarchitecture,
      title={RetrievalRouter: Joint Modality and Architecture Selection for Document Retrieval}, 
      author={Emre Kuru and Mehmet Onur Keskin and Reza Farahbakhsh and Noel Crespi},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2608.25625},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.IR},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25625}, 
}

@inproceedings{arabzadeh2021predicting,
  title     = {Predicting efficiency/effectiveness trade-offs for dense vs. sparse retrieval strategy selection},
  author    = {Arabzadeh, Negar and Yan, Xinyi and Clarke, Charles L. A.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information \& Knowledge Management (CIKM)},
  pages     = {2862--2866},
  year      = {2021}
}
```