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Multi-Armed-Bandit frameworks have often been used by researchers to assess educational interventions, however, recent work has shown that it is more beneficial for a student to provide qualitative feedback through preference elicitation…
Reinforcement learning studies how to balance exploration and exploitation in real-world systems, optimizing interactions with the world while simultaneously learning how the world operates. One general class of algorithms for such learning…
Non-dominated sorting is a computational bottleneck in Pareto-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) due to the runtime-intensive comparison operations involved in establishing dominance relationships between solution…
Finding an optimal matching in a weighted graph is a standard combinatorial problem. We consider its semi-bandit version where either a pair or a full matching is sampled sequentially. We prove that it is possible to leverage a rank-1…
Consider a bandit algorithm that recommends actions to self-interested users in a recommendation system. The users are free to choose other actions and need to be incentivized to follow the algorithm's recommendations. While the users…
An important problem in text-ranking systems is handling the hard queries that form the tail end of the query distribution. The difficulty may arise due to the presence of uncommon, underspecified, or incomplete queries. In this work, we…
In many online decision processes, the optimizing agent is called to choose between large numbers of alternatives with many inherent similarities; in turn, these similarities imply closely correlated losses that may confound standard…
Ranking passages by prompting a large language model (LLM) can achieve promising performance in modern information retrieval (IR) systems. A common approach to sort the ranking list is by prompting LLMs for a pairwise or setwise comparison…
We study a general multi-dueling bandit problem, where an agent compares multiple options simultaneously and aims to minimize the regret due to selecting suboptimal arms. This setting generalizes the traditional two-dueling bandit problem…
We consider the well-studied dueling bandit problem, where a learner aims to identify near-optimal actions using pairwise comparisons, under the constraint of differential privacy. We consider a general class of utility-based preference…
Most learning to rank research has assumed that the utility of different documents is independent, which results in learned ranking functions that return redundant results. The few approaches that avoid this have rather unsatisfyingly…
Over the last few years, contextualized pre-trained transformer models such as BERT have provided substantial improvements on information retrieval tasks. Recent approaches based on pre-trained transformer models such as BERT, fine-tune…
Rank aggregation aims to combine the preference rankings of a number of alternatives from different voters into a single consensus ranking. As a useful model for a variety of practical applications, however, it is a computationally…
We consider the problem of reward maximization in the dueling bandit setup along with constraints on resource consumption. As in the classic dueling bandits, at each round the learner has to choose a pair of items from a set of $K$ items…
Recent studies have shown the advantages of evaluating NLG systems using pairwise comparisons as opposed to direct assessment. Given $k$ systems, a naive approach for identifying the top-ranked system would be to uniformly obtain pairwise…
The contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a widely used framework for problems requiring sequential decision-making under uncertainty, such as recommendation systems. In applications involving a large number of users, the performance of…
In large-scale ranking systems, cascading architectures have been widely adopted to achieve a balance between efficiency and effectiveness. The pre-ranking module plays a vital role in selecting a subset of candidates for the subsequent…
Online decision making plays a crucial role in numerous real-world applications. In many scenarios, the decision is made based on performing a sequence of tests on the incoming data points. However, performing all tests can be expensive and…
Forced-choice conjoint designs have become a staple method in the experimentalist's toolkit. However, the forced-choice outcome is neither always consistent with the types of choices individuals make in real political contexts, nor is it…
Research on the multi-armed bandit problem has studied the trade-off of exploration and exploitation in depth. However, there are numerous applications where the cardinal absolute-valued feedback model (e.g. ratings from one to five) is not…