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In the realm of recommender systems (RS), Top-$K$ ranking metrics such as NDCG@$K$ are the gold standard for evaluating recommendation performance. However, during the training of recommendation models, optimizing NDCG@$K$ poses significant…

We propose the Heterogeneous Thurstone Model (HTM) for aggregating ranked data, which can take the accuracy levels of different users into account. By allowing different noise distributions, the proposed HTM model maintains the generality…

We initiate the study of smoothed analysis for the sequential probability assignment problem with contexts. We study information-theoretically optimal minmax rates as well as a framework for algorithmic reduction involving the maximum…

Comparative Judgement is an assessment method where item ratings are estimated based on rankings of subsets of the items. These rankings are typically pairwise, with ratings taken to be the estimated parameters from fitting a Bradley-Terry…

In this paper, we introduce a powerful technique based on Leave-one-out analysis to the study of low-rank matrix completion problems. Using this technique, we develop a general approach for obtaining fine-grained, entrywise bounds for…

Many latent (factorized) models have been proposed for recommendation tasks like collaborative filtering and for ranking tasks like document or image retrieval and annotation. Common to all those methods is that during inference the items…

To enhance the performance of the recommender system, side information is extensively explored with various features (e.g., visual features and textual features). However, there are some demerits of side information: (1) the extra data is…

Recommender system has intrinsic problems such as sparsity and fairness. Although it has been widely adopted for the past decades, research on fairness of recommendation algorithms has been largely neglected until recently. One important…

We propose a rank-$k$ variant of the classical Frank-Wolfe algorithm to solve convex optimization over a trace-norm ball. Our algorithm replaces the top singular-vector computation ($1$-SVD) in Frank-Wolfe with a top-$k$ singular-vector…

In its most traditional setting, the main concern of optimization theory is the search for optimal solutions for instances of a given computational problem. A recent trend of research in artificial intelligence, called solution diversity,…

Ranking items based on pairwise comparisons is common, from using match outcomes to rank sports teams to using purchase or survey data to rank consumer products. Statistical inference-based methods such as the Bradley-Terry model, which…

This paper studies grading algorithms for randomized exams. In a randomized exam, each student is asked a small number of random questions from a large question bank. The predominant grading rule is simple averaging, i.e., calculating…

Maximum likelihood is the most widely used statistical estimation technique. Recent work by the authors introduced a general methodology for the construction of estimators for functionals in parametric models, and demonstrated improvements…

Spectral clustering is a well-known technique which identifies $k$ clusters in an undirected graph with weight matrix $W\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times n}$ by exploiting its graph Laplacian $L(W)$, whose eigenvalues $0=\lambda_1\leq \lambda_2 \leq…

Mixtures-of-Experts models and their maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) via the EM algorithm have been thoroughly studied in the statistics and machine learning literature. They are subject of a growing investigation in the context of…

Over the last decade, an approach that has gained a lot of popularity to tackle nonparametric testing problems on general (i.e., non-Euclidean) domains is based on the notion of reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) embedding of…

This paper develops a unified estimation framework, the Maximum Ideal Likelihood Estimation (MILE), for general parametric models with latent variables. Unlike traditional approaches relying on the marginal likelihood of the observed data,…

State-space models have been used in many applications, including econometrics, engineering, medical research, etc. The maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of the static parameter of general state-space models is not straightforward because…

Existing large language models (LLMs) evaluation methods typically focus on testing the performance on some closed-environment and domain-specific benchmarks with human annotations. In this paper, we explore a novel unsupervised evaluation…

In this paper we consider the trace regression model where $n$ entries or linear combinations of entries of an unknown $m_1\times m_2$ matrix $A_0$ corrupted by noise are observed. We establish for the nuclear-norm penalized estimator of…