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This decade has seen a great deal of progress in the development of information retrieval systems. Unfortunately, we still lack a systematic understanding of the behavior of the systems and their relationship with documents. In this paper…

This paper is an extended version of [Burashnikova et al., 2021, arXiv: 2012.06910], where we proposed a theoretically supported sequential strategy for training a large-scale Recommender System (RS) over implicit feedback, mainly in the…

In many web applications, a recommendation is not a single item suggested to a user but a list of possibly interesting contents that may be ranked in some contexts. The combinatorial bandit problem has been studied quite extensively these…

In this paper we present a method for reformulating the Recommender Systems problem in an Information Retrieval one. In our tests we have a dataset of users who give ratings for some movies; we hide some values from the dataset, and we try…

When estimating the relevancy between a query and a document, ranking models largely neglect the mutual information among documents. A common wisdom is that if two documents are similar in terms of the same query, they are more likely to…

Position bias is a critical problem in information retrieval when dealing with implicit yet biased user feedback data. Unbiased ranking methods typically rely on causality models and debias the user feedback through inverse propensity…

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has proven to be highly effective in boosting the generative performance of language model in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing RAG framework either indiscriminately perform retrieval or rely…

We propose an extensible deep learning method that uses reinforcement learning to train neural networks for offline ranking in information retrieval (IR). We call our method BanditRank as it treats ranking as a contextual bandit problem. In…

Several tasks in information retrieval (IR) rely on assumptions regarding the distribution of some property (such as term frequency) in the data being processed. This thesis argues that such distributional assumptions can lead to incorrect…

In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic exploration strategy for stochastic, discrete multi-armed bandits that achieves optimal regret. Our strategy is based on the value of information criterion. This criterion measures the…

Information retrieval systems, such as online marketplaces, news feeds, and search engines, are ubiquitous in today's digital society. They facilitate information discovery by ranking retrieved items on predicted relevance, i.e. likelihood…

Taking advantage of contextual information can potentially boost the performance of recommender systems. In the era of big data, such side information often has several dimensions. Thus, developing decision-making algorithms to cope with…

A search engine recommends to the user a list of web pages. The user examines this list, from the first page to the last, and clicks on all attractive pages until the user is satisfied. This behavior of the user can be described by the…

Recommendation systems are dynamic economic systems that balance the needs of multiple stakeholders. A recent line of work studies incentives from the content providers' point of view. Content providers, e.g., vloggers and bloggers,…

An effective ranking model usually requires a large amount of training data to learn the relevance between documents and queries. User clicks are often used as training data since they can indicate relevance and are cheap to collect, but…

Personalization is important for search engines to improve user experience. Most of the existing work do pure feature engineering and extract a lot of session-style features and then train a ranking model. Here we proposed a novel way to…

The ranking incentives of many authors of Web pages play an important role in the Web dynamics. That is, authors who opt to have their pages highly ranked for queries of interest, often respond to rankings for these queries by manipulating…

In evaluation campaigns, participants often explore variations of popular, state-of-the-art baselines as a low-risk strategy to achieve competitive results. While effective, this can lead to local "hill climbing" rather than more radical…

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has introduced a new era in information retrieval (IR), where queries and documents that were once assumed to be generated exclusively by humans can now also be created by automated agents. These…

Click data collected by modern recommendation systems are an important source of observational data that can be utilized to train learning-to-rank (LTR) systems. However, these data suffer from a number of biases that can result in poor…