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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

Presentation bias is one of the key challenges when learning from implicit feedback in search engines, as it confounds the relevance signal with uninformative signals due to position in the ranking, saliency, and other presentation factors.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-12 Aman Agarwal , Ivan Zaitsev , Thorsten Joachims

Additive two-tower models are popular learning-to-rank methods for handling biased user feedback in industry settings. Recent studies, however, report a concerning phenomenon: training two-tower models on clicks collected by well-performing…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Philipp Hager , Onno Zoeter , Maarten de Rijke

Learning to rank -- producing a ranked list of items specific to a query and with respect to a set of supervisory items -- is a problem of general interest. The setting we consider is one in which no analytic description of what constitutes…

Additive two-tower models are popular learning-to-rank methods for handling biased user feedback in industry settings. Recent studies, however, report a concerning phenomenon: training two-tower models on clicks collected by well-performing…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Philipp Hager , Onno Zoeter , Maarten de Rijke

We consider the link prediction problem in a partially observed network, where the objective is to make predictions in the unobserved portion of the network. Many existing methods reduce link prediction to binary classification problem.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-02-23 Bopeng Li , Sougata Chaudhuri , Ambuj Tewari

Ranking items regarding individual user interests is a core technique of multiple downstream tasks such as recommender systems. Learning such a personalized ranker typically relies on the implicit feedback from users' past click-through…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Jiarui Jin , Zexue He , Mengyue Yang , Weinan Zhang , Yong Yu , Jun Wang , Julian McAuley

Despite advances in Preference Alignment (PA) for Large Language Models (LLMs), mainstream methods like Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) face notable challenges. These approaches require high-quality datasets of positive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-10 Xiaohua Feng , Yuyuan Li , Huwei Ji , Jiaming Zhang , Li Zhang , Tianyu Du , Chaochao Chen

This tutorial covers and contrasts the two main methodologies in unbiased Learning to Rank (LTR): Counterfactual LTR and Online LTR. There has long been an interest in LTR from user interactions, however, this form of implicit feedback is…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-07-18 Harrie Oosterhuis , Rolf Jagerman , Maarten de Rijke

It is widely recognized that deep neural networks are sensitive to bias in the data. This means that during training these models are likely to learn spurious correlations between data and labels, resulting in limited generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Vito Paolo Pastore , Massimiliano Ciranni , Davide Marinelli , Francesca Odone , Vittorio Murino

Recent advances in unbiased learning to rank (LTR) count on Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) to eliminate bias in implicit feedback. Though theoretically sound in correcting the bias introduced by treating clicked documents as relevant, IPS…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Nan Wang , Zhen Qin , Xuanhui Wang , Hongning Wang

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

Post-click conversion rate (CVR) prediction is an essential task for discovering user interests and increasing platform revenues in a range of industrial applications. One of the most challenging problems of this task is the existence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Quanyu Dai , Haoxuan Li , Peng Wu , Zhenhua Dong , Xiao-Hua Zhou , Rui Zhang , Rui zhang , Jie Sun

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) entails a variety of approaches for aligning models with human intent to alleviate the burden of reward engineering. However, most previous PbRL work has not investigated the robustness to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Sara Rajaram , R. James Cotton , Fabian H. Sinz

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

Post-click conversion, as a strong signal indicating the user preference, is salutary for building recommender systems. However, accurately estimating the post-click conversion rate (CVR) is challenging due to the selection bias, i.e., the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-11 Siyuan Guo , Lixin Zou , Yiding Liu , Wenwen Ye , Suqi Cheng , Shuaiqiang Wang , Hechang Chen , Dawei Yin , Yi Chang

Online learning to rank (ONL2R) is a foundational problem for recommender systems and has received increasing attention in recent years. Among the existing approaches for ONL2R, a natural modeling architecture is the multi-armed bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Tianchen Zhou , Jia Liu , Yang Jiao , Chaosheng Dong , Yetian Chen , Yan Gao , Yi Sun

Many studies have shown various biases targeting different demographic groups in language models, amplifying discrimination and harming fairness. Recent parameter modification debiasing approaches significantly degrade core capabilities…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Dianqing Liu , Yi Liu , Guoqing Jin , Zhendong Mao

A search engine recommends to the user a list of web pages. The user examines this list, from the first page to the last, and clicks on all attractive pages until the user is satisfied. This behavior of the user can be described by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-02 Sumeet Katariya , Branislav Kveton , Csaba Szepesvári , Zheng Wen

Debiased recommendation has recently attracted increasing attention from both industry and academic communities. Traditional models mostly rely on the inverse propensity score (IPS), which can be hard to estimate and may suffer from the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Mengyue Yang , Guohao Cai , Furui Liu , Zhenhua Dong , Xiuqiang He , Jianye Hao , Jun Wang , Xu Chen