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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

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Ali Vardasbi , Maarten de Rijke , Ilya Markov

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

Counterfactual inference aims to estimate the counterfactual outcome at the individual level given knowledge of an observed treatment and the factual outcome, with broad applications in fields such as epidemiology, econometrics, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Peng Wu , Haoxuan Li , Chunyuan Zheng , Yan Zeng , Jiawei Chen , Yang Liu , Ruocheng Guo , Kun Zhang

As Learning-to-Rank (LTR) approaches primarily seek to improve ranking quality, their output scores are not scale-calibrated by design. This fundamentally limits LTR usage in score-sensitive applications. Though a simple multi-objective…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-08-23 Aijun Bai , Rolf Jagerman , Zhen Qin , Le Yan , Pratyush Kar , Bing-Rong Lin , Xuanhui Wang , Michael Bendersky , Marc Najork

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Yiteng Tu , Zhichao Xu , Tao Yang , Weihang Su , Yujia Zhou , Yiqun Liu , Fen Lin , Qin Liu , Qingyao Ai

In modern recommendation systems, unbiased learning-to-rank (LTR) is crucial for prioritizing items from biased implicit user feedback, such as click data. Several techniques, such as Inverse Propensity Weighting (IPW), have been proposed…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Keisho Oh , Naoki Nishimura , Minje Sung , Ken Kobayashi , Kazuhide Nakata

Ranking is at the core of many artificial intelligence (AI) applications, including search engines, recommender systems, etc. Modern ranking systems are often constructed with learning-to-rank (LTR) models built from user behavior signals.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Tao Yang , Cuize Han , Chen Luo , Parth Gupta , Jeff M. Phillips , Qingyao Ai

Learning the optimal ordering of content is an important challenge in website design. The learning to rank (LTR) framework models this problem as a sequential problem of selecting lists of content and observing where users decide to click.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-12 James A. Grant , David S. Leslie

Online learning to rank (OLTR) via implicit feedback has been extensively studied for document retrieval in cases where the feedback is available at the level of individual items. To learn from item-level feedback, the current algorithms…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-01-10 Chang Li , Artem Grotov , Ilya Markov , Maarten de Rijke

Model evolution and constant availability of data are two common phenomena in large-scale real-world machine learning applications, e.g. ads and recommendation systems. To adapt, the real-world system typically retrain with all available…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Jian Zhu , Congcong Liu , Pei Wang , Xiwei Zhao , Zhangang Lin , Jingping Shao

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Claudio Lucchese , Franco Maria Nardini , Salvatore Orlando , Raffaele Perego , Alberto Veneri

Ranking systems form the basis for online search engines and recommendation services. They process large collections of items, for instance web pages or e-commerce products, and present the user with a small ordered selection. The goal of a…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Harrie Oosterhuis

Counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR) can be risky and, in various circumstances, can produce sub-optimal models that hurt performance when deployed. Safe CLTR was introduced to mitigate these risks when using inverse propensity scoring to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Shashank Gupta , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

Learning to Rank (LTR) methods are vital in online economies, affecting users and item providers. Fairness in LTR models is crucial to allocate exposure proportionally to item relevance. Widely used deterministic LTR models can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Ruocheng Guo , Jean-François Ton , Yang Liu , Hang Li

Counterfactual learning is a natural scenario to improve web-based machine translation services by offline learning from feedback logged during user interactions. In order to avoid the risk of showing inferior translations to users, in such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-12-15 Carolin Lawrence , Pratik Gajane , Stefan Riezler

In applying reinforcement learning (RL) to high-stakes domains, quantitative and qualitative evaluation using observational data can help practitioners understand the generalization performance of new policies. However, this type of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Shengpu Tang , Jenna Wiens

This paper describes a machine learning algorithm for document (re)ranking, in which queries and documents are firstly encoded using BERT [1], and on top of that a learning-to-rank (LTR) model constructed with TF-Ranking (TFR) [2] is…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Shuguang Han , Xuanhui Wang , Mike Bendersky , Marc Najork

Understanding the behavior of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for ensuring their safe and reliable use. However, existing explainable AI (XAI) methods for LLMs primarily rely on word-level explanations, which are often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Furui Cheng , Vilém Zouhar , Robin Shing Moon Chan , Daniel Fürst , Hendrik Strobelt , Mennatallah El-Assady

Many platforms on the web present ranked lists of content to users, typically optimized for engagement-, satisfaction- or retention- driven metrics. Advances in the Learning-to-Rank (LTR) research literature have enabled rapid growth in…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Hitesh Sagtani , Olivier Jeunen , Aleksei Ustimenko