Related papers: Top-N-Rank: A Scalable List-wise Ranking Method fo…

We explore the top-$K$ rank aggregation problem. Suppose a collection of items is compared in pairs repeatedly, and we aim to recover a consistent ordering that focuses on the top-$K$ ranked items based on partially revealed preference…

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong reasoning abilities in domains like mathematics, coding, and scientific problem-solving, yet their potential for ranking tasks, where prime examples include retrieval, recommender…

We introduce a novel re-ranking model that aims to augment the functionality of standard search engines to support classroom search activities for children (ages 6 to 11). This model extends the known listwise learning-to-rank framework by…

In recent years, neural networks have enjoyed a renaissance as function approximators in reinforcement learning. Two decades after Tesauro's TD-Gammon achieved near top-level human performance in backgammon, the deep reinforcement learning…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been integrated into recommender systems to enhance user behavior comprehension. The Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technique is further incorporated into these systems to retrieve more relevant items…

The task of item recommendation requires ranking a large catalogue of items given a context. Item recommendation algorithms are evaluated using ranking metrics that depend on the positions of relevant items. To speed up the computation of…

The primary goal of a recommender system is often known as "helping users find relevant items", and a lot of recommendation algorithms are proposed accordingly. However, these accuracy-oriented methods usually suffer the problem of…

Learning-to-rank is an applied domain of supervised machine learning. As feature selection has been found to be effective for improving the accuracy of learning models in general, it is intriguing to investigate this process for…

Generative recommendation systems, driven by large language models (LLMs), present an innovative approach to predicting user preferences by modeling items as token sequences and generating recommendations in a generative manner. A critical…

Optimising a ranking-based metric, such as Average Precision (AP), is notoriously challenging due to the fact that it is non-differentiable, and hence cannot be optimised directly using gradient-descent methods. To this end, we introduce an…

Recent work has shown that standard training via empirical risk minimization (ERM) can produce models that achieve high accuracy on average but low accuracy on underrepresented groups due to the prevalence of spurious features. A…

Adaptations of Transformer models, such as BERT4Rec and SASRec, achieve state-of-the-art performance in the sequential recommendation task according to accuracy-based metrics, such as NDCG. These models treat items as tokens and then…

In large-scale recommender systems, retrieving top N relevant candidates accurately with resource constrain is crucial. To evaluate the performance of such retrieval models, Recall@N, the frequency of positive samples being retrieved in the…

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…

In information retrieval, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in text reranking tasks by leveraging their sophisticated natural language understanding and advanced reasoning capabilities. However,…

While recent advancements in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with recommendation tasks have shown great potential and promising performance overall, these aligned recommendation LLMs still face challenges in complex scenarios. This is…

Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…

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…

Activation functions influence behavior and performance of DNNs. Nonlinear activation functions, like Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), Exponential Linear Units (ELU) and Scaled Exponential Linear Units (SELU), outperform the linear…

Ranking is a key aspect of many applications, such as information retrieval, question answering, ad placement and recommender systems. Learning to rank has the goal of estimating a ranking model automatically from training data. In…