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Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
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AD-Rank & Shape-CFD: Physics-Inspired Reranking via Conservative Advection-Diffusion on Document Point Clouds for Dense Retrieval

Authors: Chen, Yifan;

AD-Rank & Shape-CFD: Physics-Inspired Reranking via Conservative Advection-Diffusion on Document Point Clouds for Dense Retrieval

Abstract

We propose Shape-CFD, a physics-inspired post-retrieval reranking framework that models the relevance redistribution among candidate documents as a conservative convection-diffusion process on a document similarity graph. Unlike pure diffusion approaches, our method introduces a directional advection term derived from the query-document alignment field, enabling asymmetric, query-aware score propagation while preserving total relevance mass through a conservative upwind discretization scheme. We further extend the framework from single-point document embeddings to sentence-level point clouds, replacing cosine similarity with the Chamfer distance to capture fine-grained, sub-document semantic matches. Shape-CFD achieves competitive ranking quality on three BEIR benchmarks, including a 21.5 percent NDCG@10 improvement on NFCorpus, and an 80 percent win rate in blind LLM evaluation on a Chinese statutory retrieval task, while maintaining a reranking latency of 5 ms on commodity hardware.

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
Average
Average
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