@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2026-dont,
    title = "Don{'}t Be Misled by Style: A Style-Adaptive Reranker for Capturing Effective Knowledge in Retrieval-Augmented Generation",
    author = "Zhang, Ruwen  and
      Liu, Bo  and
      Xiang, Zhang Sheng  and
      Chen, Yida  and
      Zhao, Hantao  and
      Ding, Ding  and
      Jin, Jiahui  and
      Cao, Jiuxin",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.302/",
    pages = "6665--6681",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Rerankers are critical in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for filtering evidence that enhances the accurate generation of LLMs. With the extension to open-domain scenarios, rerankers are inevitably deployed on mixed-style corpora, whereas most existing rerankers are mainly trained on well-edited texts. A rarely explored issue lies in enabling rerankers to maximally capture the effective knowledge for downstream LLMs without being misled by stylistic features. To address this issue, we propose SARK (Style-Adaptive Reranker with Knowledge Prioritization), a style-augmented multi-task framework that prioritizes effective knowledge over stylistic perturbations. SARK performs multi-granular knowledge mining by using an LLM to derive passage-level supervision on whether a passage helps or harms answer correctness, and list-level relative ranking preferences over candidate passages. It then jointly optimizes the reranker model with passage-level classification and list-level ranking objectives via style-augmented multi-task learning, encouraging the model to focus on the information needed for answering under mixed-style scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SARK improves generation performance across multiple LLMs under mixed-style conditions."
}