Related papers: Counterfactual Learning to Rank using Heterogeneou…

Causal inference, or counterfactual prediction, is central to decision making in healthcare, policy and social sciences. To de-bias causal estimators with high-dimensional data in observational studies, recent advances suggest the…

Presence of bias (in datasets or tasks) is inarguably one of the most critical challenges in machine learning applications that has alluded to pivotal debates in recent years. Such challenges range from spurious associations between…

This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with limited prior knowledge. In the domain of swarm robotics for instance, the expert can hardly design a reward function or demonstrate the target behavior, forbidding the use of both…

Offline Reinforcement learning is commonly used for sequential decision-making in domains such as healthcare and education, where the rewards are known and the transition dynamics $T$ must be estimated on the basis of batch data. A key…

User interaction data is an important source of supervision in counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR). Such data suffers from presentation bias. Much work in unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) focuses on position bias, i.e., items at higher…

We investigate the exploitation of both lexical and neural relevance signals for ad-hoc passage retrieval. Our exploration involves a large-scale training dataset in which dense neural representations of MS-MARCO queries and passages are…

Click through rates (CTR) offer useful user feedback that can be used to infer the relevance of search results for queries. However it is not very meaningful to look at the raw click through rate of a search result because the likelihood of…

Ranking is a key aspect of many applications, such as information retrieval, question answering, ad placement and recommender systems. Learning to rank has the goal of estimating a ranking model automatically from training data. In…

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction plays a core role in recommender systems, serving as the final-stage filter to rank items for a user. The key to addressing the CTR task is learning feature interactions that are useful for prediction,…

Credit assignment in reinforcement learning is the problem of measuring an action's influence on future rewards. In particular, this requires separating skill from luck, i.e. disentangling the effect of an action on rewards from that of…

Societal biases that are contained in retrieved documents have received increased interest. Such biases, which are often prevalent in the training data and learned by the model, can cause societal harms, by misrepresenting certain groups,…

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.…

Recently, pre-trained language models such as BERT have been applied to document ranking for information retrieval, which first pre-train a general language model on an unlabeled large corpus and then conduct ranking-specific fine-tuning on…

Many Information Retrieval (IR) models make use of offline statistical techniques to score documents for ranking over a single period, rather than use an online, dynamic system that is responsive to users over time. In this paper, we…

The study of online decision-making problems that leverage contextual information has drawn notable attention due to their significant applications in fields ranging from healthcare to autonomous systems. In modern applications, contextual…

Rankings are the primary interface through which many online platforms match users to items (e.g. news, products, music, video). In these two-sided markets, not only the users draw utility from the rankings, but the rankings also determine…

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming useful in many domains due to their impressive abilities that arise from large training datasets and large model sizes. More recently, they have been shown to be very effective in textual…

Online learning to rank is a core problem in information retrieval and machine learning. Many provably efficient algorithms have been recently proposed for this problem in specific click models. The click model is a model of how the user…

The need to evaluate treatment effectiveness is ubiquitous in most of empirical science, and interest in flexibly investigating effect heterogeneity is growing rapidly. To do so, a multitude of model-agnostic, nonparametric meta-learners…

LinkedIn search is deeply personalized - for the same queries, different searchers expect completely different results. This paper presents our approach to achieving this by mining various data sources available in LinkedIn to infer…