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Estimating consumer preferences is central to many problems in economics and marketing. This paper develops a flexible framework for learning individual preferences from partial ranking information by interpreting observed rankings as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-19 Yu-Chang Chen , Chen Chian Fuh , Shang En Tsai

Search engines answer users' queries by listing relevant items (e.g. documents, songs, products, web pages, ...). These engines rely on algorithms that learn to rank items so as to present an ordered list maximizing the probability that it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Stefan Magureanu , Alexandre Proutiere , Marcus Isaksson , Boxun Zhang

Approaches for estimating preferences from human annotated data typically involves inducing a distribution over a ranked list of choices such as the Plackett-Luce model. Indeed, modern AI alignment tools such as Reward Modelling and Direct…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-20 Chirag Nagpal

Mixture models of Plackett-Luce (PL) -- one of the most fundamental ranking models -- are an active research area of both theoretical and practical significance. Most previously proposed parameter estimation algorithms instantiate the EM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Duc Nguyen , Anderson Y. Zhang

A simple generative model for rank ordered data with ties is presented. The model is based on ordering geometric latent variables and can be seen as the discrete counterpart of the Plackett-Luce (PL) model, a popular, relatively tractable…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-12-19 Daniel A. Henderson

Mixtures of ranking models have been widely used for heterogeneous preferences. However, learning a mixture model is highly nontrivial, especially when the dataset consists of partial orders. In such cases, the parameter of the model may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-28 Zhibing Zhao , Lirong Xia

This paper studies human preference learning based on partially revealed choice behavior and formulates the problem as a generalized Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) ranking model that accounts for heterogeneous preferences. Specifically, we assume…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-03 Jianqing Fan , Hyukjun Kwon , Xiaonan Zhu

Learning-to-rank (LTR) is a set of supervised machine learning algorithms that aim at generating optimal ranking order over a list of items. A lot of ranking models have been studied during the past decades. And most of them treat each…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-06-09 RuiXing Wang , Kuan Fang , RiKang Zhou , Zhan Shen , LiWen Fan

In this paper, we propose new listwise learning-to-rank models that mitigate the shortcomings of existing ones. Existing listwise learning-to-rank models are generally derived from the classical Plackett-Luce model, which has three major…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-01-24 Xiaofeng Zhu , Diego Klabjan

Ranking and comparing items is crucial for collecting information about preferences in many areas, from marketing to politics. The Mallows rank model is among the most successful approaches to analyse rank data, but its computational…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-04-28 Valeria Vitelli , Øystein Sørensen , Marta Crispino , Arnoldo Frigessi , Elja Arjas

We consider the problem of ranking a set of items from pairwise comparisons in the presence of features associated with the items. Recent works have established that $O(n\log(n))$ samples are needed to rank well when there is no feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-10 Aadirupa Saha , Arun Rajkumar

The widely used Plackett-Luce ranking model assumes that individuals rank items by making repeated choices from a universe of items. But in many cases the universe is too big for people to plausibly consider all options. In the choice…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Ben Aoki-Sherwood , Catherine Bregou , David Liben-Nowell , Kiran Tomlinson , Thomas Zeng

In learning-to-rank (LTR), optimizing only the relevance (or the expected ranking utility) can cause representational harm to certain categories of items. Moreover, if there is implicit bias in the relevance scores, LTR models may fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Sruthi Gorantla , Eshaan Bhansali , Amit Deshpande , Anand Louis

Multinomial Logit (MNL) is one of the most popular discrete choice models and has been widely used to model ranking data. However, there is a long-standing technical challenge of learning MNL from many real-world ranking data: exact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Jiaqi Ma , Xingjian Zhang , Qiaozhu Mei

Given an undirected graph representing similarities between a set of items and an additive measure evaluating the items, we treat the position of a special subset of items in an ordinal ranking through a collection of combinatorial…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Samuel Boardman

Preference learning in Large Language Models (LLMs) has advanced significantly, yet existing methods remain limited by modest performance gains, high computational costs, hyperparameter sensitivity, and insufficient modeling of global…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Liang Zhu , Yuelin Bai , Xiankun Ren , Jiaxi Yang , Lei Zhang , Feiteng Fang , Hamid Alinejad-Rokny , Minghuan Tan , Min Yang

Ranking over sets arise when users choose between groups of items. For example, a group may be of those movies deemed $5$ stars to them, or a customized tour package. It turns out, to model this data type properly, we need to investigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-08-04 Truyen Tran , Dinh Phung , Svetha Venkatesh

Many latent (factorized) models have been proposed for recommendation tasks like collaborative filtering and for ranking tasks like document or image retrieval and annotation. Common to all those methods is that during inference the items…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-10-19 Jason Weston , John Blitzer

Although the foundations of ranking are well established, the ranking literature has primarily been focused on simple, unimodal models, e.g. the Mallows and Plackett-Luce models, that define distributions centered around a single total…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Arjun Seshadri , Stephen Ragain , Johan Ugander

A Multinomial Logit (MNL) model is composed of a finite universe of items $[n]=\{1,..., n\}$, each assigned a positive weight. A query specifies an admissible subset -- called a slate -- and the model chooses one item from that slate with…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Flavio Chierichetti , Mirko Giacchini , Ravi Kumar , Silvio Lattanzi , Alessandro Panconesi , Erasmo Tani , Andrew Tomkins