Related papers: Optimize What You Evaluate With: A Simple Yet Effe…

Learning to Rank (LTR) is one of the most widely used machine learning applications. It is a key component in platforms with profound societal impacts, including job search, healthcare information retrieval, and social media content feeds.…

Learning to rank with implicit feedback is one of the most important tasks in many real-world information systems where the objective is some specific utility, e.g., clicks and revenue. However, we point out that existing methods based on…

Optimising a ranking-based metric, such as Average Precision (AP), is notoriously challenging due to the fact that it is non-differentiable, and hence cannot be optimised directly using gradient-descent methods. To this end, we introduce an…

Recent developments in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) allow large language models (LLMs) to function as implicit ranking models by maximizing the margin between preferred and non-preferred responses. In practice, user feedback on such…

We propose a new model for supervised learning to rank. In our model, the relevance labels are assumed to follow a categorical distribution whose probabilities are constructed based on a scoring function. We optimize the training objective…

Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

Recommender systems are tasked to infer users' evolving preferences and rank items aligned with their intents, which calls for in-depth reasoning beyond pattern-based scoring. Recent efforts start to leverage large language models (LLMs)…

The widely used retrieve-and-rerank pipeline faces two critical limitations: they are constrained by the initial retrieval quality of the top-k documents, and the growing computational demands of LLM-based rerankers restrict the number of…

This paper concerns a deep learning approach to relevance ranking in information retrieval (IR). Existing deep IR models such as DSSM and CDSSM directly apply neural networks to generate ranking scores, without explicit understandings of…

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…

Implicit feedback data, such as user clicks, is commonly used in learning-to-rank (LTR) systems because it is easy to collect and it often reflects user preferences. However, this data is prone to various biases, and training an LTR…

Most learning to rank research has assumed that the utility of different documents is independent, which results in learned ranking functions that return redundant results. The few approaches that avoid this have rather unsatisfyingly…

Low-rank regularization (LRR) has been widely applied in various machine learning tasks, but the associated optimization is challenging. Directly optimizing the rank function under constraints is NP-hard in general. To overcome this…

Interpretable Learning to Rank (LtR) is an emerging field within the research area of explainable AI, aiming at developing intelligible and accurate predictive models. While most of the previous research efforts focus on creating post-hoc…

The importance of accurate recommender systems has been widely recognized by academia and industry. However, the recommendation quality is still rather low. Recently, a linear sparse and low-rank representation of the user-item matrix has…

The last decade has seen a revolution in the theory and application of machine learning and pattern recognition. Through these advancements, variable ranking has emerged as an active and growing research area and it is now beginning to be…

Learning to rank has been intensively studied and widely applied in information retrieval. Typically, a global ranking function is learned from a set of labeled data, which can achieve good performance on average but may be suboptimal for…

In order to find experts, different approaches build rankings of people, assuming that they are ranked by level of expertise, and use typical Information Retrieval (IR) measures to evaluate their effectiveness. However, we figured out that…

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn a near-optimal policy from a fixed dataset of transitions collected by another policy. This problem has attracted a lot of attention recently, but most existing methods with strong…

Web page ranking and collaborative filtering require the optimization of sophisticated performance measures. Current Support Vector approaches are unable to optimize them directly and focus on pairwise comparisons instead. We present a new…