Related papers: Valid Explanations for Learning to Rank Models

While standard IR models are mainly designed to optimize relevance, real-world search often needs to balance additional objectives such as diversity and fairness. These objectives depend on inter-document interactions and are commonly…

In recent years, representation learning has become the research focus of the machine learning community. Large-scale neural networks are a crucial step toward achieving general intelligence, with their success largely attributed to their…

With the improving semantic understanding capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), they exhibit a greater awareness and alignment with human values, but this comes at the cost of transparency. Although promising results are achieved via…

Learning to Rank (LTR) algorithms are usually evaluated using Information Retrieval metrics like Normalised Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) or Mean Average Precision. As these metrics rely on sorting predicted items' scores (and thus, on…

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a superior ability to serve as ranking models. However, concerns have arisen as LLMs will exhibit discriminatory ranking behaviors based on users' sensitive attributes (\eg gender).…

Recent work has shown that inducing a large language model (LLM) to generate explanations prior to outputting an answer is an effective strategy to improve performance on a wide range of reasoning tasks. In this work, we show that neural…

Unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) aims to mitigate various biases existing in user clicks, such as position bias, trust bias, presentation bias, and learn an effective ranker. In this paper, we introduce our winning approach for the…

Online learning to rank (OLTR) aims to learn a ranker directly from implicit feedback derived from users' interactions, such as clicks. Clicks however are a biased signal: specifically, top-ranked documents are likely to attract more clicks…

We propose a novel combinatorial inference framework to conduct general uncertainty quantification in ranking problems. We consider the widely adopted Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model, where each item is assigned a positive preference score…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems typically rely on a single fixed retriever, despite growing evidence that no single retriever performs optimally across all query types. In this paper, we explore a query routing approach that…

Recently, neural networks have been successfully employed to improve upon state-of-the-art performance in ad-hoc retrieval tasks via machine-learned ranking functions. While neural retrieval models grow in complexity and impact, little is…

Click data collected by modern recommendation systems are an important source of observational data that can be utilized to train learning-to-rank (LTR) systems. However, these data suffer from a number of biases that can result in poor…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful candidates for complex decision-making, leveraging vast encoded knowledge and remarkable zero-shot abilities. However, their adoption in high-stakes environments is hindered by their opacity; their…

In web search and recommendation systems, user clicks are widely used to train ranking models. However, click data is heavily biased, i.e., users tend to click higher-ranked items (position bias), choose only what was shown to them…

Ranking problems, also known as preference learning problems, define a widely spread class of statistical learning problems with many applications, including fraud detection, document ranking, medicine, credit risk screening, image ranking…

In the last years decision-focused learning framework, also known as predict-and-optimize, have received increasing attention. In this setting, the predictions of a machine learning model are used as estimated cost coefficients in the…

Since its inception, the field of unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) has remained very active and has seen several impactful advancements in recent years. This tutorial provides both an introduction to the core concepts of the field and an…

Model evolution and constant availability of data are two common phenomena in large-scale real-world machine learning applications, e.g. ads and recommendation systems. To adapt, the real-world system typically retrain with all available…

Domain adaptation aims to transfer the knowledge learned on (data-rich) source domains to (low-resource) target domains, and a popular method is invariant representation learning, which matches and aligns the data distributions on the…

Unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) studies the problem of mitigating various biases from implicit user feedback data such as clicks, and has been receiving considerable attention recently. A popular ULTR approach for real-world applications…