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We consider the problem of probably approximately correct (PAC) ranking $n$ items by adaptively eliciting subset-wise preference feedback. At each round, the learner chooses a subset of $k$ items and observes stochastic feedback indicating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-06 Aadirupa Saha , Aditya Gopalan

Ranking and comparing items is crucial for collecting information about preferences in many areas, from marketing to politics. The Mallows rank model is among the most successful approaches to analyse rank data, but its computational…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-04-28 Valeria Vitelli , Øystein Sørensen , Marta Crispino , Arnoldo Frigessi , Elja Arjas

We consider the problem of active coarse ranking, where the goal is to sort items according to their means into clusters of pre-specified sizes, by adaptively sampling from their reward distributions. This setting is useful in many social…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-21 Sumeet Katariya , Lalit Jain , Nandana Sengupta , James Evans , Robert Nowak

Rank aggregation based on pairwise comparisons over a set of items has a wide range of applications. Although considerable research has been devoted to the development of rank aggregation algorithms, one basic question is how to efficiently…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-12-22 Xi Chen , Kevin Jiao , Qihang Lin

Sorting is one of the oldest computing problems and is still very important in the age of big data. Various algorithms and implementation techniques have been proposed. In this study, we focus on comparison based, internal sorting…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-09-16 Hantao Zhang , Baoluo Meng , Yiwen Liang

Data generation and labeling are usually an expensive part of learning for robotics. While active learning methods are commonly used to tackle the former problem, preference-based learning is a concept that attempts to solve the latter by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-11 Erdem Bıyık , Dorsa Sadigh

Aligning large language models (LLMs) depends on high-quality datasets of human preference labels, which are costly to collect. Although active learning has been studied to improve sample efficiency relative to passive collection, many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yao Zhao , Kwang-Sung Jun

This paper studies the sample complexity (aka number of comparisons) bounds for the active best-$k$ items selection from pairwise comparisons. From a given set of items, the learner can make pairwise comparisons on every pair of items, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-02 Wenbo Ren , Jia Liu , Ness B. Shroff

Learning-to-rank techniques have proven to be extremely useful for prioritization problems, where we rank items in order of their estimated probabilities, and dedicate our limited resources to the top-ranked items. This work exposes a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-22 Cynthia Rudin , Yining Wang

In this work, we leverage a generative data model considering comparison noise to develop a fast, precise, and informative ranking algorithm from pairwise comparisons that produces a measure of confidence on each comparison. The problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Filipa Valdeira , Cláudia Soares

We study the top-$K$ ranking problem where the goal is to recover the set of top-$K$ ranked items out of a large collection of items based on partially revealed preferences. We consider an adversarial crowdsourced setting where there are…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2016-02-16 Changho Suh , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Renbo Zhao

Effective learning of user preferences is critical to easing user burden in various types of matching problems. Equally important is active query selection to further reduce the amount of preference information users must provide. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-22 Laurent Charlin , Rich Zemel , Craig Boutilier

We explore the top-$K$ rank aggregation problem. Suppose a collection of items is compared in pairs repeatedly, and we aim to recover a consistent ordering that focuses on the top-$K$ ranked items based on partially revealed preference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-15 Minje Jang , Sunghyun Kim , Changho Suh , Sewoong Oh

We study very simple sorting algorithms based on a probabilistic comparator model. In our model, errors in comparing two elements are due to (1) the energy or effort put in the comparison and (2) the difference between the compared…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-05-16 Barbara Geissmann , Paolo Penna

Several methods of preference modeling, ranking, voting and multi-criteria decision making include pairwise comparisons. It is usually simpler to compare two objects at a time, furthermore, some relations (e.g., the outcome of sports…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-04 László Gyarmati , Éva Orbán-Mihálykó , Csaba Mihálykó , Sándor Bozóki , Zsombor Szádoczki

Model selection is treated as a standard performance boosting step in many machine learning applications. Once all other properties of a learning problem are fixed, the model is selected by grid search on a held-out validation set. This is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-28 Manuel Haussmann , Fred A. Hamprecht , Melih Kandemir

Learning the preferences of a human improves the quality of the interaction with the human. The number of queries available to learn preferences maybe limited especially when interacting with a human, and so active learning is a must. One…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Sriram Gopalakrishnan , Utkarsh Soni

Sorting is an essential operation in computer science with direct consequences on the performance of large scale data systems, real-time systems, and embedded computation. However, no sorting algorithm is optimal under all distributions of…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Shrinivass Arunachalam Balasubramanian

In this paper, we present a framework based on a simple data structure and parameterized algorithms for the problems of finding items in an unsorted list of linearly ordered items based on their rank (selection) or value (search). As a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2009-09-30 Ankur Gupta , Anna Kispert , Jonathan P. Sorenson

Active learning aims to select a small subset of data for annotation such that a classifier learned on the data is highly accurate. This is usually done using heuristic selection methods, however the effectiveness of such methods is limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-08-09 Meng Fang , Yuan Li , Trevor Cohn