jina-reranker-v3: Last but Not Late Interaction for Document Reranking

Feng Wang, Yuqing Li, Han Xiao

Published 2025-09-29, updated 2025-10-01Version 2

jina-reranker-v3 is a 0.6B parameter multilingual document reranker that introduces a novel last but not late interaction. Unlike late interaction models such as ColBERT that perform separate encoding followed by multi-vector matching, our approach conducts causal self-attention between query and documents within the same context window, enabling rich cross-document interactions before extracting contextual embeddings from the last token of each document. This compact architecture achieves state-of-the-art BEIR performance with 61.94 nDCG@10 while being significant smaller than generative listwise rerankers.