Related papers: Choosing to Rank
Rankings are a type of preference elicitation that arise in experiments where assessors arrange items, for example, in decreasing order of utility. Orderings of n items labelled {1,...,n} denoted are permutations that reflect strict…
In applications such as recommendation systems and revenue management, it is important to predict preferences on items that have not been seen by a user or predict outcomes of comparisons among those that have never been compared. A popular…
Decision-making often involves ranking and selection. For example, to assemble a team of political forecasters, we might begin by narrowing our choice set to the candidates we are confident rank among the top 10% in forecasting ability.…
Fairness in ranking models is crucial, as disparities in exposure can disproportionately affect protected groups. Most fairness-aware ranking systems focus on ensuring comparable average exposure for groups across the entire ranked list,…
Ranking models are the main components of information retrieval systems. Several approaches to ranking are based on traditional machine learning algorithms using a set of hand-crafted features. Recently, researchers have leveraged deep…
Large language models are often ranked according to their level of alignment with human preferences -- a model is better than other models if its outputs are more frequently preferred by humans. One of the popular ways to elicit human…
A common problem in machine learning is to rank a set of n items based on pairwise comparisons. Here ranking refers to partitioning the items into sets of pre-specified sizes according to their scores, which includes identification of the…
Recommender systems are tasked to infer users' evolving preferences and rank items aligned with their intents, which calls for in-depth reasoning beyond pattern-based scoring. Recent efforts start to leverage large language models (LLMs)…
Traditional approaches to ranking in web search follow the paradigm of rank-by-score: a learned function gives each query-URL combination an absolute score and URLs are ranked according to this score. This paradigm ensures that if the score…
The study of network formation is pervasive in economics, sociology, and many other fields. In this paper, we model network formation as a `choice' that is made by nodes in a network to connect to other nodes. We study these `choices' using…
In multiclass classification, the goal is to learn how to predict a random label $Y$, valued in $\mathcal{Y}=\{1,\; \ldots,\; K \}$ with $K\geq 3$, based upon observing a r.v. $X$, taking its values in $\mathbb{R}^q$ with $q\geq 1$ say, by…
In multi-objective decision planning and learning, much attention is paid to producing optimal solution sets that contain an optimal policy for every possible user preference profile. We argue that the step that follows, i.e, determining…
In economic theory, an agent chooses from available alternatives -- modeled as a set. In decisions in the field or in the lab, however, agents do not have access to the set of alternatives at once. Instead, alternatives are represented by…
Rankings are ubiquitous in the online world today. As we have transitioned from finding books in libraries to ranking products, jobs, job applicants, opinions and potential romantic partners, there is a substantial precedent that ranking…
The allocation of limited resources to a large number of potential candidates presents a pervasive challenge. In the context of ranking and selecting top candidates from heteroscedastic units, conventional methods often result in…
Assortment optimization is a fundamental challenge in modern retail and recommendation systems, where the goal is to select a subset of products that maximizes expected revenue under complex customer choice behaviors. While recent advances…
The Mallows model is a popular distribution for ranked data. We empirically and theoretically analyze how the properties of rankings sampled from the Mallows model change when increasing the number of alternatives. We find that real-world…
Neural document ranking models perform impressively well due to superior language understanding gained from pre-training tasks. However, due to their complexity and large number of parameters, these (typically transformer-based) models are…
Rankings are central to decision-making in fields ranging from education to online platforms, yet classical deterministic methods such as the Borda count method or Copeland-type pairwise methods ignore uncertainty due to sampling noise or…
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…