Related papers: Unifying Online and Counterfactual Learning to Ran…
To support complex search tasks, where the initial information requirements are complex or may change during the search, a search engine must adapt the information delivery as the user's information requirements evolve. To support this…
A critical need for industrial recommender systems is the ability to evaluate recommendation policies offline, before deploying them to production. Unfortunately, widely used off-policy evaluation methods either make strong assumptions…
Counterfactual reasoning from logged data has become increasingly important for many applications such as web advertising or healthcare. In this paper, we address the problem of learning stochastic policies with continuous actions from the…
Knowledge tracing (KT) plays a crucial role in computer-aided education and intelligent tutoring systems, aiming to assess students' knowledge proficiency by predicting their future performance on new questions based on their past response…
Neural ranking models have become increasingly popular for real-world search and recommendation systems in recent years. Unlike their tree-based counterparts, neural models are much less interpretable. That is, it is very difficult to…
The remarkable success of Artificial Intelligence in advancing automated decision-making is evident both in academia and industry. Within the plethora of applications, ranking systems hold significant importance in various domains. This…
Data-centric learning emphasizes curating high-quality training samples to boost performance rather than designing new architectures. A central problem is to estimate the influence of training sample efficiently. Prior studies largely focus…
Learning to Rank (LTR) technique is ubiquitous in the Information Retrieval system nowadays, especially in the Search Ranking application. The query-item relevance labels typically used to train the ranking model are often noisy…
Reinforcement learning is well suited for optimizing policies of recommender systems. Current solutions mostly focus on model-free approaches, which require frequent interactions with the real environment, and thus are expensive in model…
Unbiased Learning to Rank (ULTR) studies the problem of learning a ranking function based on biased user interactions. In this framework, ULTR algorithms have to rely on a large amount of user data that are collected, stored, and aggregated…
We develop an algorithm to train individually fair learning-to-rank (LTR) models. The proposed approach ensures items from minority groups appear alongside similar items from majority groups. This notion of fair ranking is based on the…
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…
Local explanations of learning-to-rank (LTR) models are thought to extract the most important features that contribute to the ranking predicted by the LTR model for a single data point. Evaluating the accuracy of such explanations is…
We propose a new framework for imitation learning -- treating imitation as a two-player ranking-based game between a policy and a reward. In this game, the reward agent learns to satisfy pairwise performance rankings between behaviors,…
Although click data is widely used in search systems in practice, so far the inherent bias, most notably position bias, has prevented it from being used in training of a ranker for search, i.e., learning-to-rank. Recently, a number of…
Existing online learning to rank (OL2R) solutions are limited to linear models, which are incompetent to capture possible non-linear relations between queries and documents. In this work, to unleash the power of representation learning in…
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…
In Online Learning to Rank (OLTR) the aim is to find an optimal ranking model by interacting with users. When learning from user behavior, systems must interact with users while simultaneously learning from those interactions. Unlike other…
Counterfactual thinking describes a psychological phenomenon that people re-infer the possible results with different solutions about things that have already happened. It helps people to gain more experience from mistakes and thus to…
Accurately evaluating new policies (e.g. ad-placement models, ranking functions, recommendation functions) is one of the key prerequisites for improving interactive systems. While the conventional approach to evaluation relies on online A/B…