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Recommender systems are designed to learn user preferences from observed feedback and comprise many fundamental tasks, such as rating prediction and post-click conversion rate (pCVR) prediction. However, the observed feedback usually suffer…

Preference learning is a widely adopted post-training technique that aligns large language models (LLMs) to human preferences and improves specific downstream task capabilities. In this work we systematically investigate how specific…

Training and refreshing a web-scale Question Answering (QA) system for a multi-lingual commercial search engine often requires a huge amount of training examples. One principled idea is to mine implicit relevance feedback from user behavior…

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…

Many prediction domains, such as ad placement, recommendation, trajectory prediction, and document summarization, require predicting a set or list of options. Such lists are often evaluated using submodular reward functions that measure…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on downstream tasks by in-context learning (ICL), which heavily relies on the quality of demonstrations selected from a large set of annotated examples. Recent works claim that…

Item recommendation is the task of predicting a personalized ranking on a set of items (e.g. websites, movies, products). In this paper, we investigate the most common scenario with implicit feedback (e.g. clicks, purchases). There are many…

Ranked search results have become the main mechanism by which we find content, products, places, and people online. Thus their ordering contributes not only to the satisfaction of the searcher, but also to career and business opportunities,…

Rewards serve as a measure of user satisfaction and act as a limiting factor in interactive recommender systems. In this research, we focus on the problem of learning to reward (LTR), which is fundamental to reinforcement learning. Previous…

Modern personalized recommendation services often rely on user feedback, either explicit or implicit, to improve the quality of services. Explicit feedback refers to behaviors like ratings, while implicit feedback refers to behaviors like…

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…

For industrial learning-to-rank (LTR) systems, it is common that the output of a ranking model is modified, either as a results of post-processing logic that enforces business requirements, or as a result of unforeseen design flaws or bugs…

Presence of bias (in datasets or tasks) is inarguably one of the most critical challenges in machine learning applications that has alluded to pivotal debates in recent years. Such challenges range from spurious associations between…

Learning and evaluating recommender systems from logged implicit feedback is challenging due to exposure bias. While inverse propensity scoring (IPS) corrects this bias, it often suffers from high variance and instability. In this paper, we…

Learning-to-rank (LTR) has become a key technology in E-commerce applications. Most existing LTR approaches follow a supervised learning paradigm from offline labeled data collected from the online system. However, it has been noticed that…

This paper studies the problem of learning interactive recommender systems from logged feedbacks without any exploration in online environments. We address the problem by proposing a general offline reinforcement learning framework for…

Unbiased Learning to Rank (ULTR) aims to train unbiased ranking models from biased click logs, by explicitly modeling a generation process for user behavior and fitting click data based on examination hypothesis. Previous research found…

We consider an online learning to rank setting in which, at each round, an oblivious adversary generates a list of $m$ documents, pertaining to a query, and the learner produces scores to rank the documents. The adversary then generates a…

Counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR) aims to learn a ranking policy from user interactions while correcting for the inherent biases in interaction data, such as position bias. Existing CLTR methods assume a single ranking policy that…

Conventional methods for query autocompletion aim to predict which completed query a user will select from a list. A shortcoming of this approach is that users often do not know which query will provide the best retrieval performance on the…