Related papers: The Lovasz-Bregman Divergence and connections to r…
Ranking is used for a wide array of problems, most notably information retrieval (search). There are a number of popular approaches to the evaluation of ranking such as Kendall's $\tau$, Average Precision, and nDCG. When dealing with…
We introduce a correlation coefficient that is designed to deal with a variety of ranking formats including those containing non-strict (i.e., with-ties) and incomplete (i.e., unknown) preferences. The correlation coefficient is designed to…
Learning-to-Rank (LTR) is a supervised machine learning approach that constructs models specifically designed to order a set of items or documents based on their relevance or importance to a given query or context. Despite significant…
We propose a novel combinatorial inference framework to conduct general uncertainty quantification in ranking problems. We consider the widely adopted Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model, where each item is assigned a positive preference score…
The Mallows model occupies a central role in parametric modelling of ranking data to learn preferences of a population of judges. Despite the wide range of metrics for rankings that can be considered in the model specification, the choice…
Ensuring fairness in algorithmic ranking systems is a critical challenge with significant societal implications for hiring, recommendations, web search, and data management. Standard methods for aggregating multiple preference orders into a…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to assign document relevance labels in information retrieval pipelines, especially in domains lacking human-labeled data. However, different models often disagree on borderline cases,…
In this paper, we establish a connection between ranking theory and general equilibrium theory. First of all, we show that the ranking vector of PageRank or Invariant method is precisely the equilibrium of a special Cobb-Douglas market.…
The ubiquitous proliferation of online social networks has led to the widescale emergence of relational graphs expressing unique patterns in link formation and descriptive user node features. Matrix Factorization and Completion have become…
Traditional statistical inference on ordinal comparison data results in an overall ranking of objects, e.g., from best to worst, with each object having a unique rank. However, ranks of some objects may not be statistically distinguishable.…
Mallows permutation model, introduced by Mallows in statistical ranking theory, is a class of non-uniform probability measures on the symmetric group $S_n$. The model depends on a distance metric $d(\sigma,\tau)$ on $S_n$, which can be…
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate as autonomous agents that reason over external APIs to perform complex tasks. However, their reliability and agreement remain poorly characterized. We present a unified benchmarking…
We present a novel Bayesian topic model for learning discourse-level document structure. Our model leverages insights from discourse theory to constrain latent topic assignments in a way that reflects the underlying organization of document…
In this paper, we develop the metric geometry of ranking statistics, proving that the two major permutation distances in the statistics literature -- Kendall tau and Spearman footrule -- extend naturally to incomplete rankings with both…
Recently, Moffat et al. proposed an analytic framework, namely C/W/L/A, for offline evaluation metrics. This framework allows information retrieval (IR) researchers to design evaluation metrics through the flexible combination of user…
We introduce a new family of minmax rank aggregation problems under two distance measures, the Kendall {\tau} and the Spearman footrule. As the problems are NP-hard, we proceed to describe a number of constant-approximation algorithms for…
Implicit feedback (e.g., click, dwell time) is an attractive source of training data for Learning-to-Rank, but its naive use leads to learning results that are distorted by presentation bias. For the special case of optimizing average rank…
We consider the link prediction problem in a partially observed network, where the objective is to make predictions in the unobserved portion of the network. Many existing methods reduce link prediction to binary classification problem.…
Bregman divergences play a central role in the design and analysis of a range of machine learning algorithms. This paper explores the use of Bregman divergences to establish reductions between such algorithms and their analyses. We present…
Clustered data are common in practice. Clustering arises when subjects are measured repeatedly, or subjects are nested in groups (e.g., households, schools). It is often of interest to evaluate the correlation between two variables with…