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

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Unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) studies the problem of mitigating various biases from implicit user feedback data such as clicks, and has been receiving considerable attention recently. A popular ULTR approach for real-world applications…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Yunan Zhang , Le Yan , Zhen Qin , Honglei Zhuang , Jiaming Shen , Xuanhui Wang , Michael Bendersky , Marc Najork

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Xiaojie Sun , Lulu Yu , Yiting Wang , Keping Bi , Jiafeng Guo

Counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR) relies on exposure-based inverse propensity scoring (IPS), a LTR-specific adaptation of IPS to correct for position bias. While IPS can provide unbiased and consistent estimates, it often suffers from…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Shashank Gupta , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

Pairwise debiasing is one of the most effective strategies in reducing position bias in learning-to-rank (LTR) models. However, limiting the scope of this strategy, are the underlying assumptions required by many pairwise debiasing…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Alexey Kurennoy , John Coleman , Ian Harris , Alice Lynch , Oisin Mac Fhearai , Daphne Tsatsoulis

Implicit feedback is widely leveraged in recommender systems since it is easy to collect and provides weak supervision signals. Recent works reveal a huge gap between the implicit feedback and user-item relevance due to the fact that…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Can Chen , Chen Ma , Xi Chen , Sirui Song , Hao Liu , Xue Liu

Estimating position bias is a well-known challenge in Learning to Rank (L2R). Click data in e-commerce applications, such as targeted advertisements and search engines, provides implicit but abundant feedback to improve personalized…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Shion Ishikawa , Yun Ching Liu , Young-Joo Chung , Yu Hirate

Learning-to-rank (LTR) is a class of supervised learning techniques that apply to ranking problems dealing with a large number of features. The popularity and widespread application of LTR models in prioritizing information in a variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Jaspreet Singh , Zhenye Wang , Megha Khosla , Avishek Anand

Ranking is at the core of many artificial intelligence (AI) applications, including search engines, recommender systems, etc. Modern ranking systems are often constructed with learning-to-rank (LTR) models built from user behavior signals.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Tao Yang , Cuize Han , Chen Luo , Parth Gupta , Jeff M. Phillips , Qingyao Ai

Learning to Rank (LTR) models learn from historical user interactions, such as user clicks. However, there is an inherent bias in the clicks of users due to position bias, i.e., users are more likely to click highly-ranked documents than…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Zeyan Liang , Graham McDonald , Iadh Ounis

Unbiased learning-to-rank (ULTR) is a well-established framework for learning from user clicks, which are often biased by the ranker collecting the data. While theoretically justified and extensively tested in simulation, ULTR techniques…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Philipp Hager , Romain Deffayet , Jean-Michel Renders , Onno Zoeter , Maarten de Rijke

Recommender and search systems commonly rely on Learning To Rank models trained on logged user interactions to order items by predicted relevance. However, such interaction data is often subject to position bias, as users are more likely to…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Aleksandr V. Petrov , Michael Murtagh , Karthik Nagesh

Probabilistic learning to rank (LTR) has been the dominating approach for optimizing the ranking metric, but cannot maximize long-term rewards. Reinforcement learning models have been proposed to maximize user long-term rewards by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Teng Xiao , Suhang Wang

While implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, dwell times, etc.) is an abundant and attractive source of data for learning to rank, it can produce unfair ranking policies for both exogenous and endogenous reasons. Exogenous reasons typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Himank Yadav , Zhengxiao Du , Thorsten Joachims

Traditional ranking systems optimize offline proxy objectives that rely on oversimplified assumptions about user behavior, often neglecting factors such as position bias and item diversity. Consequently, these models fail to improve true…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Gaurav Bhatt , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Tanmay Gangwani , Tesi Xiao , Leonid Sigal

Optimizing ranking systems based on user interactions is a well-studied problem. State-of-the-art methods for optimizing ranking systems based on user interactions are divided into online approaches - that learn by directly interacting with…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-12-09 Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

In this paper, we propose a novel ranking framework for collaborative filtering with the overall aim of learning user preferences over items by minimizing a pairwise ranking loss. We show the minimization problem involves dependent random…

Web applications where users are presented with a limited selection of items have long employed ranking models to put the most relevant results first. Any feedback received from users is typically assumed to reflect a relative judgement on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Maarten Buyl , Paul Missault , Pierre-Antoine Sondag

The page presentation biases in the information retrieval system, especially on the click behavior, is a well-known challenge that hinders improving ranking models' performance with implicit user feedback. Unbiased Learning to Rank~(ULTR)…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Haitao Mao , Lixin Zou , Yujia Zheng , Jiliang Tang , Xiaokai Chu , Jiashu Zhao , Qian Wang , Dawei Yin

Common click-through rate (CTR) prediction recommender models tend to exhibit feature-level bias, which leads to unfair recommendations among item groups and inaccurate recommendations for users. While existing methods address this issue by…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Jinqiu Jin , Sihao Ding , Wenjie Wang , Fuli Feng

Most recommender systems optimize the model on observed interaction data, which is affected by the previous exposure mechanism and exhibits many biases like popularity bias. The loss functions, such as the mostly used pointwise Binary…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-04-27 Qi Wan , Xiangnan He , Xiang Wang , Jiancan Wu , Wei Guo , Ruiming Tang