Related papers: Accelerated Convergence for Counterfactual Learnin…
Learning-to-rank (LTR) algorithms are ubiquitous and necessary to explore the extensive catalogs of media providers. To avoid the user examining all the results, its preferences are used to provide a subset of relatively small size. The…
Contrastive learning-based recommendation algorithms have significantly advanced the field of self-supervised recommendation, particularly with BPR as a representative ranking prediction task that dominates implicit collaborative filtering.…
Clicks on rankings suffer from position-bias: generally items on lower ranks are less likely to be examined - and thus clicked - by users, in spite of their actual preferences between items. The prevalent approach to unbiased click-based…
Inverse problems are paramount in Science and Engineering. In this paper, we consider the setup of Statistical Inverse Problem (SIP) and demonstrate how Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithms can be used in the linear SIP setting. We…
Unbiased Learning to Rank (ULTR) that learns to rank documents with biased user feedback data is a well-known challenge in information retrieval. Existing methods in unbiased learning to rank typically rely on click modeling or inverse…
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…
Recommender systems are designed to learn user preferences from observed feedback and comprise many fundamental tasks, such as rating prediction and post-click conversion rate (pCVR) prediction. However, the observed feedback usually suffer…
Stochastic gradient algorithms are the main focus of large-scale optimization problems and led to important successes in the recent advancement of the deep learning algorithms. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of…
Presentation bias is one of the key challenges when learning from implicit feedback in search engines, as it confounds the relevance signal with uninformative signals due to position in the ranking, saliency, and other presentation factors.…
Stochastic gradient descent with backpropagation is the workhorse of artificial neural networks. It has long been recognized that backpropagation fails to be a biologically plausible algorithm. Fundamentally, it is a non-local procedure --…
In counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR) user interactions are used as a source of supervision. Since user interactions come with bias, an important focus of research in this field lies in developing methods to correct for the bias of…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used techniques for online optimization in machine learning. In this work, we accelerate SGD by adaptively learning how to sample the most useful training examples at each time…
Learning from implicit user feedback is challenging as we can only observe positive samples but never access negative ones. Most conventional methods cope with this issue by adopting a pairwise ranking approach with negative sampling.…
Off-policy learning ability is an important feature of reinforcement learning (RL) for practical applications. However, even one of the most elementary RL algorithms, temporal-difference (TD) learning, is known to suffer form divergence…
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…
Decision-makers are faced with the challenge of estimating what is likely to happen when they take an action. For instance, if I choose not to treat this patient, are they likely to die? Practitioners commonly use supervised learning…
Counterfactual evaluation can estimate Click-Through-Rate (CTR) differences between ranking systems based on historical interaction data, while mitigating the effect of position bias and item-selection bias. We introduce the novel…
In recent years, dense retrieval has been the focus of information retrieval (IR) research. While effective, dense retrieval produces uninterpretable dense vectors, and suffers from the drawback of large index size. Learned sparse retrieval…
In this paper, we introduce proximal gradient temporal difference learning, which provides a principled way of designing and analyzing true stochastic gradient temporal difference learning algorithms. We show how gradient TD (GTD)…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a powerful optimization technique that is particularly useful in online learning scenarios. Its convergence analysis is relatively well understood under the assumption that the data samples are…