Related papers: Inductive Pairwise Ranking: Going Beyond the n log…

Unbiased Learning to Rank (ULTR) that learns to rank documents with biased user feedback data is a well-known challenge in information retrieval. Existing methods in unbiased learning to rank typically rely on click modeling or inverse…

We develop an algorithm to train individually fair learning-to-rank (LTR) models. The proposed approach ensures items from minority groups appear alongside similar items from majority groups. This notion of fair ranking is based on the…

There are three fundamental asks from a ranking algorithm: it should scale to handle a large number of items, sort items accurately by their utility, and impose a total order on the items for logical consistency. But here's the catch-no…

Preference learning has gained significant attention in tasks involving subjective human judgments, such as \emph{speech emotion recognition} (SER) and image aesthetic assessment. While pairwise frameworks such as RankNet offer robust…

Image-Text Retrieval (ITR) is essentially a ranking problem. Given a query caption, the goal is to rank candidate images by relevance, from large to small. The current ITR datasets are constructed in a pairwise manner. Image-text pairs are…

Implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, dwell times, etc.) is an abundant source of data in human-interactive systems. While implicit feedback has many advantages (e.g., it is inexpensive to collect, user centric, and timely), its inherent biases…

Recommendation systems often rely on point-wise loss metrics such as the mean squared error. However, in real recommendation settings only few items are presented to a user. This observation has recently encouraged the use of rank-based…

This paper considers ranking inference of $n$ items based on the observed data on the top choice among $M$ randomly selected items at each trial. This is a useful modification of the Plackett-Luce model for $M$-way ranking with only the top…

A preference order or ranking aggregated from pairwise comparison data is commonly understood as a strict total order. However, in real-world scenarios, some items are intrinsically ambiguous in comparisons, which may very well be an…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful approach for aligning generative models, but its reliance on learned reward models makes it vulnerable to mis-specification and reward hacking. Preference-based…

Neural ranking models have become increasingly popular for real-world search and recommendation systems in recent years. Unlike their tree-based counterparts, neural models are much less interpretable. That is, it is very difficult to…

Offline imitation learning (offline IL) enables training effective policies without requiring explicit reward annotations. Recent approaches attempt to estimate rewards for unlabeled datasets using a small set of expert demonstrations.…

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…

Recent developments in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) allow large language models (LLMs) to function as implicit ranking models by maximizing the margin between preferred and non-preferred responses. In practice, user feedback on such…

Neighbor-based collaborative ranking (NCR) techniques follow three consecutive steps to recommend items to each target user: first they calculate the similarities among users, then they estimate concordance of pairwise preferences to the…

Preference-based data often appear complex and noisy but may conceal underlying homogeneous structures. This paper introduces a novel framework of ranking structure recognition for preference-based data. We first develop an approach to…

The forward order assumption postulates that the ranking process of the items is carried out by sequentially assigning the positions from the top (most-liked) to the bottom (least-liked) alternative. This assumption has been recently…

We study online preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) with the goal of improving sample efficiency. While a growing body of theoretical work has emerged-motivated by PbRL's recent empirical success, particularly in aligning large…

Pairwise ranking models have been widely used to address recommendation problems. The basic idea is to learn the rank of users' preferred items through separating items into \emph{positive} samples if user-item interactions exist, and…

This paper proposes a new method for solving the well-known rank aggregation problem from pairwise comparisons using the method of low-rank matrix completion. The partial and noisy data of pairwise comparisons is transformed into a matrix…