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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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-02-16 Lulu Yu , Yiting Wang , Xiaojie Sun , Keping Bi , Jiafeng Guo

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-01-06 Shengyao Zhuang , Zhihao Qiao , Guido Zuccon

Counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR) aims to learn a ranking policy from user interactions while correcting for the inherent biases in interaction data, such as position bias. Existing CLTR methods assume a single ranking policy that…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Shashank Gupta , Yiming Liao , Maarten de Rijke

Counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR) has attracted extensive attention in the IR community for its ability to leverage massive logged user interaction data to train ranking models. While the CLTR models can be theoretically unbiased when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Zechun Niu , Zhilin Zhang , Jiaxin Mao , Qingyao Ai , Ji-Rong Wen

Learning to Rank (LTR) models learn from historical user interactions, such as user clicks. However, there is an inherent bias in the clicks of users due to position bias, i.e., users are more likely to click highly-ranked documents than…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Zeyan Liang , Graham McDonald , Iadh Ounis

Presentation bias is one of the key challenges when learning from implicit feedback in search engines, as it confounds the relevance signal. While it was recently shown how counterfactual learning-to-rank (LTR) approaches…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2018-12-14 Aman Agarwal , Ivan Zaitsev , Xuanhui Wang , Cheng Li , Marc Najork , Thorsten Joachims

Recent advances in unbiased learning to rank (LTR) count on Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) to eliminate bias in implicit feedback. Though theoretically sound in correcting the bias introduced by treating clicked documents as relevant, IPS…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Nan Wang , Zhen Qin , Xuanhui Wang , Hongning Wang

Implicit feedback (e.g., click, dwell time) is an attractive source of training data for Learning-to-Rank, but its naive use leads to learning results that are distorted by presentation bias. For the special case of optimizing average rank…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-08-28 Aman Agarwal , Kenta Takatsu , Ivan Zaitsev , Thorsten Joachims

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Yunan Zhang , Le Yan , Zhen Qin , Honglei Zhuang , Jiaming Shen , Xuanhui Wang , Michael Bendersky , Marc Najork

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Haoming Gong , Qingyao Ai , Zhihao Tao , Yongfeng Zhang

The goal of unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) is to leverage implicit user feedback for optimizing learning-to-rank systems. Among existing solutions, automatic ULTR algorithms that jointly learn user bias models (i.e., propensity models)…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Dan Luo , Lixin Zou , Qingyao Ai , Zhiyu Chen , Chenliang Li , Dawei Yin , Brian D. Davison

Common click-through rate (CTR) prediction recommender models tend to exhibit feature-level bias, which leads to unfair recommendations among item groups and inaccurate recommendations for users. While existing methods address this issue by…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Jinqiu Jin , Sihao Ding , Wenjie Wang , Fuli Feng

Nowadays, recommender systems already impact almost every facet of peoples lives. To provide personalized high quality recommendation results, conventional systems usually train pointwise rankers to predict the absolute value of objectives…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-12-01 Yi Ren , Hongyan Tang , Siwen Zhu

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Camilo Gomez , Pengyang Wang , Yanjie Fu

Ranked search results have become the main mechanism by which we find content, products, places, and people online. Thus their ordering contributes not only to the satisfaction of the searcher, but also to career and business opportunities,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Meike Zehlike , Carlos Castillo

Position bias is a critical problem in information retrieval when dealing with implicit yet biased user feedback data. Unbiased ranking methods typically rely on causality models and debias the user feedback through inverse propensity…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-05-27 Jiarui Jin , Yuchen Fang , Weinan Zhang , Kan Ren , Guorui Zhou , Jian Xu , Yong Yu , Jun Wang , Xiaoqiang Zhu , Kun Gai

The purpose of modeling document relevance for search engines is to rank better in subsequent searches. Document-specific historical click-through rates can be important features in a dynamic ranking system which updates as we accumulate…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Richard Demsyn-Jones

Counterfactual reasoning is an important paradigm applicable in many fields, such as healthcare, economics, and education. In this work, we propose a novel method to address the issue of \textit{selection bias}. We learn two groups of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-20 Zichen Zhang , Qingfeng Lan , Lei Ding , Yue Wang , Negar Hassanpour , Russell Greiner

An effective ranking model usually requires a large amount of training data to learn the relevance between documents and queries. User clicks are often used as training data since they can indicate relevance and are cheap to collect, but…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Xiaojie Sun , Lulu Yu , Yiting Wang , Keping Bi , Jiafeng Guo

The Unbiased Learning-to-Rank framework has been recently proposed as a general approach to systematically remove biases, such as position bias, from learning-to-rank models. The method takes two steps - estimating click propensities and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Grigor Aslanyan , Utkarsh Porwal