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Recent research shows that pre-trained language models (PLMs) suffer from "prompt bias" in factual knowledge extraction, i.e., prompts tend to introduce biases toward specific labels. Prompt bias presents a significant challenge in…
Missing data is frequently encountered in many areas of statistics. Propensity score weighting is a popular method for handling missing data. The propensity score method employs a response propensity model, but correct specification of the…
Performative prediction is a recently proposed framework where predictions guide decision-making and hence influence future data distributions. Such performative phenomena are ubiquitous in various areas, such as transportation, finance,…
Large language models (LLMs) enhanced with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have introduced a new paradigm for web search. However, the limited context awareness of LLMs degrades their performance on RAG tasks. Existing methods to…
Learning-to-Rank (LTR) is a supervised machine learning approach that constructs models specifically designed to order a set of items or documents based on their relevance or importance to a given query or context. Despite significant…
A key methodological challenge in observational studies with interference between units is twofold: (1) each unit's outcome may depend on many others' treatments, and (2) treatment assignments may exhibit complex dependencies across units.…
Predictive models are often introduced to decision-making tasks under the rationale that they improve performance over an existing decision-making policy. However, it is challenging to compare predictive performance against an existing…
We introduce a novel latent grouping model for predicting the relevance of a new document to a user. The model assumes a latent group structure for both users and documents. We compared the model against a state-of-the-art method, the User…
Incremental learning enables artificial agents to learn from sequential data. While important progress was made by exploiting deep neural networks, incremental learning remains very challenging. This is particularly the case when no memory…
Nowadays, search ranking and recommendation systems rely on a lot of data to train machine learning models such as Learning-to-Rank (LTR) models to rank results for a given query, and implicit user feedbacks (e.g. click data) have become…
Actively inferring user preferences, for example by asking good questions, is important for any human-facing decision-making system. Active inference allows such systems to adapt and personalize themselves to nuanced individual preferences.…
In reinforcement learning (RL), experience replay-based sampling techniques play a crucial role in promoting convergence by eliminating spurious correlations. However, widely used methods such as uniform experience replay (UER) and…
A long line of work in social psychology has studied variations in people's susceptibility to persuasion -- the extent to which they are willing to modify their opinions on a topic. This body of literature suggests an interesting…
Attribution and fact verification are critical challenges in natural language processing for assessing information reliability. While automated systems and Large Language Models (LLMs) aim to retrieve and select concise evidence to support…
The feedback data of recommender systems are often subject to what was exposed to the users; however, most learning and evaluation methods do not account for the underlying exposure mechanism. We first show in theory that applying…
Counterfactual inference aims to estimate the counterfactual outcome at the individual level given knowledge of an observed treatment and the factual outcome, with broad applications in fields such as epidemiology, econometrics, and…
Author profiling is the task of inferring characteristics about individuals by analyzing content they share. Supervised machine learning still dominates automatic systems that perform this task, despite the popularity of prompting large…
Continual learning, the setting where a learning agent is faced with a never ending stream of data, continues to be a great challenge for modern machine learning systems. In particular the online or "single-pass through the data" setting…
We propose a new online learning model for learning with preference feedback. The model is especially suited for applications like web search and recommender systems, where preference data is readily available from implicit user feedback…
Personalization is a crucial aspect of many online experiences. In particular, content ranking is often a key component in delivering sophisticated personalization results. Commonly, supervised learning-to-rank methods are applied, which…