Related papers: Off-Policy Evaluation of Probabilistic Identity Da…
The voluntary carbon market is an important building block in the fight against climate change. However, it is not trivial for consumers to verify whether carbon offset projects deliver what they promise. While technical solutions for…
Large-scale Web-based services present opportunities for improving UI policies based on observed user interactions. We address challenges of learning such policies through model-free offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) with off-policy…
Industrial recommender systems deal with extremely large action spaces -- many millions of items to recommend. Moreover, they need to serve billions of users, who are unique at any point in time, making a complex user state space. Luckily,…
It is increasingly common to collect pre-post data with pseudonyms or self-constructed identifiers. On survey responses from sensitive populations, identifiers may be made optional to encourage higher response rates. The ability to match…
Offline policy learning aims to discover decision-making policies from previously-collected datasets without additional online interactions with the environment. As the training dataset is fixed, its quality becomes a crucial determining…
Multiple synthetic data generation models have emerged, among which deep learning models have become the vanguard due to their ability to capture the underlying characteristics of the original data. However, the resemblance of the synthetic…
Many assumptions that underpin human concepts of identity do not hold for machine minds that can be copied, edited, or simulated. We argue that there exist many different coherent identity boundaries (e.g.\ instance, model, persona), and…
Most of the existing approaches for person re-identification consider a static setting where the number of cameras in the network is fixed. An interesting direction, which has received little attention, is to explore the dynamic nature of a…
Many web systems rank and present a list of items to users, from recommender systems to search and advertising. An important problem in practice is to evaluate new ranking policies offline and optimize them before they are deployed. We…
Automated decision making is used routinely throughout our everyday life. Recommender systems decide which jobs, movies, or other user profiles might be interesting to us. Spell checkers help us to make good use of language. Fraud detection…
Person re-identification aims to identify a person from an image collection, given one image of that person as the query. There is, however, a plethora of real-life scenarios where we may not have a priori library of query images and…
Over the last decade, proliferation of various online platforms and their increasing adoption by billions of users have heightened the privacy risk of a user enormously. In fact, security researchers have shown that sparse microdata…
To accumulate knowledge and improve its policy of behaviour, a reinforcement learning agent can learn `off-policy' about policies that differ from the policy used to generate its experience. This is important to learn counterfactuals, or…
Click models are an important tool for leveraging user feedback, and are used by commercial search engines for surfacing relevant search results. However, existing click models are lacking in two aspects. First, they do not share…
As we shift more of our lives into the virtual domain, the volume of data shared on the web keeps increasing and presents a threat to our privacy. This works contributes to the understanding of privacy implications of such data sharing by…
Social media in scientific research offer a unique digital observatory of human behaviours and hence great opportunities to conduct research at large scale answering complex sociodemographic questions. We focus on the identification and…
This paper studies the evaluation of policies that recommend an ordered set of items (e.g., a ranking) based on some context---a common scenario in web search, ads, and recommendation. We build on techniques from combinatorial bandits to…
Pseudo-labeling is a popular semi-supervised learning technique to leverage unlabeled data when labeled samples are scarce. The generation and selection of pseudo-labels heavily rely on labeled data. Existing approaches implicitly assume…
In many online platforms, customers' decisions are substantially influenced by product rankings as most customers only examine a few top-ranked products. Concurrently, such platforms also use the same data corresponding to customers'…
Metadata are associated to most of the information we produce in our daily interactions and communication in the digital world. Yet, surprisingly, metadata are often still catergorized as non-sensitive. Indeed, in the past, researchers and…