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The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven progress in reasoning tasks -- from program synthesis to scientific hypothesis generation -- yet their ability to handle ranked preferences and structured algorithms in combinatorial…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Hadi Hosseini , Samarth Khanna , Ronak Singh

An important use of machine learning is to learn what people value. What posts or photos should a user be shown? Which jobs or activities would a person find rewarding? In each case, observations of people's past choices can inform our…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-12-21 Owain Evans , Andreas Stuhlmueller , Noah D. Goodman

Given an incomplete ratings data over a set of users and items, the preference completion problem aims to estimate a personalized total preference order over a subset of the items. In practical settings, a ranked list of top-$k$ items from…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2019-04-16 Shameem A Puthiya Parambath , Nishant Vijayakumar , Sanjay Chawla

Conjoint analysis is a popular experimental design used to measure multidimensional preferences. Researchers examine how varying a factor of interest, while controlling for other relevant factors, influences decision-making. Currently,…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-20 Dae Woong Ham , Kosuke Imai , Lucas Janson

Assessors make preference judgments faster and more consistently than graded judgments. Preference judgments can also recognize distinctions between items that appear equivalent under graded judgments. Unfortunately, preference judgments…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Charles L. A. Clarke , Alexandra Vtyurina , Mark D. Smucker

We propose a new online learning model for learning with preference feedback. The model is especially suited for applications like web search and recommender systems, where preference data is readily available from implicit user feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-11-04 Pannagadatta K. Shivaswamy , Thorsten Joachims

We revisit the problem of inferring the overall ranking among entities in the framework of Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model, based on available empirical data on pairwise preferences. By a simple transformation, we can cast the problem as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-10 Vivek S. Borkar , Nikhil Karamchandani , Sharad Mirani

We consider a rank regression setting, in which a dataset of $N$ samples with features in $\mathbb{R}^d$ is ranked by an oracle via $M$ pairwise comparisons. Specifically, there exists a latent total ordering of the samples; when presented…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-05 Berkan Kadioglu , Peng Tian , Jennifer Dy , Deniz Erdogmus , Stratis Ioannidis

Feature selection can facilitate the learning of mixtures of discrete random variables as they arise, e.g. in crowdsourcing tasks. Intuitively, not all workers are equally reliable but, if the less reliable ones could be eliminated, then…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-28 Vincent Zhao , Steven W. Zucker

Recommender systems play a critical role in enhancing user experience by providing personalized suggestions based on user preferences. Traditional approaches often rely on explicit numerical ratings or assume access to fully ranked lists of…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Bahar Boroomand , James R. Wright

Preference learning algorithms (e.g., RLHF and DPO) are frequently used to steer LLMs to produce generations that are more preferred by humans, but our understanding of their inner workings is still limited. In this work, we study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Angelica Chen , Sadhika Malladi , Lily H. Zhang , Xinyi Chen , Qiuyi Zhang , Rajesh Ranganath , Kyunghyun Cho

In this paper we extend the principle of proportional representation to rankings. We consider the setting where alternatives need to be ranked based on approval preferences. In this setting, proportional representation requires that…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2016-12-06 Piotr Skowron , Martin Lackner , Markus Brill , Dominik Peters , Edith Elkind

At the present time, sequential item recommendation models are compared by calculating metrics on a small item subset (target set) to speed up computation. The target set contains the relevant item and a set of negative items that are…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-07-29 Alexander Dallmann , Daniel Zoller , Andreas Hotho

Reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy by interaction with an environment. Consequently, learning complex behavior requires a vast number of samples, which can be prohibitive in practice. Nevertheless, instead of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Sarah Müller , Alexander von Rohr , Sebastian Trimpe

Learning user preferences for products based on their past purchases or reviews is at the cornerstone of modern recommendation engines. One complication in this learning task is that some users are more likely to purchase products or review…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Wanning Chen , Mohsen Bayati

We propose a novel sparse preference learning/ranking algorithm. Our algorithm approximates the true utility function by a weighted sum of basis functions using the squared loss on pairs of data points, and is a generalization of the kernel…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-07-04 Evgeni Tsivtsivadze , Tom Heskes

Direct alignment methods are increasingly used for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, these methods suffer from the issues of verbosity and likelihood displacement, which can be driven by the noisy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Peter Chen , Xi Chen , Wotao Yin , Tianyi Lin

Eliciting user preferences from purchase records for performing purchase prediction is challenging because negative feedback is not explicitly observed, and because treating all non-purchased items equally as negative feedback is…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-06-01 Chanyoung Park , Donghyun Kim , Min-Chul Yang , Jung-Tae Lee , Hwanjo Yu

In this paper we model the problem of learning preferences of a population as an active learning problem. We propose an algorithm can adaptively choose pairs of items to show to users coming from a heterogeneous population, and use the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-23 Aniruddha Bhargava , Ravi Ganti , Robert Nowak

Ordering the expected outcomes across a collection of clusters after performing a covariate adjustment commonly arises in many applied settings, such as healthcare provider evaluation. Regression parameters in such covariate adjustment…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-21 Nicholas C. Henderson , Nicholas Hartman