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Related papers: Unbiased Learning-to-Rank with Biased Feedback

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Clicks on rankings suffer from position-bias: generally items on lower ranks are less likely to be examined - and thus clicked - by users, in spite of their actual preferences between items. The prevalent approach to unbiased click-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Harrie Oosterhuis

Learning to rank systems has become an important aspect of our daily life. However, the implicit user feedback that is used to train many learning to rank models is usually noisy and suffered from user bias (i.e., position bias). Thus,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-08-12 Anh Tran , Tao Yang , Qingyao Ai

Clickthrough data is a particularly inexpensive and plentiful resource to obtain implicit relevance feedback for improving and personalizing search engines. However, it is well known that the probability of a user clicking on a result is…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Filip Radlinski , Thorsten Joachims

Unbiased learning to rank (ULTR), which aims to learn unbiased ranking models from biased user behavior logs, plays an important role in Web search. Previous research on ULTR has studied a variety of biases in users' clicks, such as…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Zechun Niu , Lang Mei , Liu Yang , Ziyuan Zhao , Qiang Yan , Jiaxin Mao , Ji-Rong Wen

Reward modeling represents a long-standing challenge in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for aligning language models. Current reward modeling is heavily contingent upon experimental feedback data with high collection…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Hao Wang , Haocheng Yang , Licheng Pan , Lei Shen , Xiaoxi Li , Yinuo Wang , Zhichao Chen , Yuan Lu , Haoxuan Li , Zhouchen Lin

Learning to rank with implicit feedback is one of the most important tasks in many real-world information systems where the objective is some specific utility, e.g., clicks and revenue. However, we point out that existing methods based on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Xinyi Dai , Jiawei Hou , Qing Liu , Yunjia Xi , Ruiming Tang , Weinan Zhang , Xiuqiang He , Jun Wang , Yong Yu

Unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) aims to mitigate various biases existing in user clicks, such as position bias, trust bias, presentation bias, and learn an effective ranker. In this paper, we introduce our winning approach for the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-02-16 Lulu Yu , Yiting Wang , Xiaojie Sun , Keping Bi , Jiafeng Guo

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-05-27 Jiarui Jin , Yuchen Fang , Weinan Zhang , Kan Ren , Guorui Zhou , Jian Xu , Yong Yu , Jun Wang , Xiaoqiang Zhu , Kun Gai

Online learning to rank (OLTR) aims to learn a ranker directly from implicit feedback derived from users' interactions, such as clicks. Clicks however are a biased signal: specifically, top-ranked documents are likely to attract more clicks…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-01-06 Shengyao Zhuang , Zhihao Qiao , Guido Zuccon

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-05-13 Zohreh Ovaisi , Ragib Ahsan , Yifan Zhang , Kathryn Vasilaky , Elena Zheleva

Counterfactual Learning to Rank (LTR) methods optimize ranking systems using logged user interactions that contain interaction biases. Existing methods are only unbiased if users are presented with all relevant items in every ranking. There…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-04-12 Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

Nowadays, search ranking and recommendation systems rely on a lot of data to train machine learning models such as Learning-to-Rank (LTR) models to rank results for a given query, and implicit user feedbacks (e.g. click data) have become…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Yinxiao Li

Besides position bias, which has been well-studied, trust bias is another type of bias prevalent in user interactions with rankings: users are more likely to click incorrectly w.r.t. their preferences on highly ranked items because they…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-09-10 Ali Vardasbi , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-08-28 Aman Agarwal , Kenta Takatsu , Ivan Zaitsev , Thorsten Joachims

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Camilo Gomez , Pengyang Wang , Yanjie Fu

Recommender systems widely use implicit feedback such as click data because of its general availability. Although the presence of clicks signals the users' preference to some extent, the lack of such clicks does not necessarily indicate a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-16 Yuta Saito , Suguru Yaginuma , Yuta Nishino , Hayato Sakata , Kazuhide Nakata

How to obtain an unbiased ranking model by learning to rank with biased user feedback is an important research question for IR. Existing work on unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) can be broadly categorized into two groups -- the studies on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-12-03 Qingyao Ai , Tao Yang , Huazheng Wang , Jiaxin Mao

The Unbiased Learning-to-Rank framework has been recently proposed as a general approach to systematically remove biases, such as position bias, from learning-to-rank models. The method takes two steps - estimating click propensities and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Grigor Aslanyan , Utkarsh Porwal

Learning to Rank (LTR) from user interactions is challenging as user feedback often contains high levels of bias and noise. At the moment, two methodologies for dealing with bias prevail in the field of LTR: counterfactual methods that…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Rolf Jagerman , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

In most real-world recommender systems, the observed rating data are subject to selection bias, and the data are thus missing-not-at-random. Developing a method to facilitate the learning of a recommender with biased feedback is one of the…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Yuta Saito