Related papers: Unifying Online and Counterfactual Learning to Ran…

LLMs and AI chatbots have improved people's efficiency in various fields. However, the necessary knowledge for answering the question may be beyond the models' knowledge boundaries. To mitigate this issue, many researchers try to introduce…

As machine learning is increasingly used to inform consequential decision-making (e.g., pre-trial bail and loan approval), it becomes important to explain how the system arrived at its decision, and also suggest actions to achieve a…

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays an important role in online advertising and recommender systems. In practice, the training of CTR models depends on click data which is intrinsically biased towards higher positions since higher…

Probabilistic models can learn users' preferences from the history of their item adoptions on a social media site, and in turn, recommend new items to users based on learned preferences. However, current models ignore psychological factors…

In this work, we propose an adversarial learning method for reward estimation in reinforcement learning (RL) based task-oriented dialog models. Most of the current RL based task-oriented dialog systems require the access to a reward signal…

State-of-the-art recommender system (RS) mostly rely on complex deep neural network (DNN) model structure, which makes it difficult to provide explanations along with RS decisions. Previous researchers have proved that providing…

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction, which predicts the probability of a user clicking an ad, is a fundamental task in recommender systems. The emergence of heterogeneous information, such as user profile and behavior sequences, depicts…

Large-scale supervised data is essential for training modern ranking models, but obtaining high-quality human annotations is costly. Click data has been widely used as a low-cost alternative, and with recent advances in large language…

Unlike traditional supervised learning, in many settings only partial feedback is available. We may only observe outcomes for the chosen actions, but not the counterfactual outcomes associated with other alternatives. Such settings…

Information Retrieval (IR) systems used in search and recommendation platforms frequently employ Learning-to-Rank (LTR) models to rank items in response to user queries. These models heavily rely on features derived from user interactions,…

Since the 2016 US Presidential election, social media abuse has been eliciting massive concern in the academic community and beyond. Preventing and limiting the malicious activity of users, such as trolls and bots, in their manipulation…

In aims to uncover insights into medical decision-making embedded within observational data from clinical settings, we present a novel application of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) that identifies suboptimal clinician actions based on…

Since its inception, the field of unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) has remained very active and has seen several impactful advancements in recent years. This tutorial provides both an introduction to the core concepts of the field and an…

The task of expert finding has been getting increasing attention in information retrieval literature. However, the current state-of-the-art is still lacking in principled approaches for combining different sources of evidence in an optimal…

We propose a novel approach for inferring the individualized causal effects of a treatment (intervention) from observational data. Our approach conceptualizes causal inference as a multitask learning problem; we model a subject's potential…

Real-word search and recommender systems usually adopt a multi-stage ranking architecture, including matching, pre-ranking, ranking, and re-ranking. Previous works mainly focus on the ranking stage while very few focus on the pre-ranking…

E-Commerce (E-Com) search is an emerging important new application of information retrieval. Learning to Rank (LETOR) is a general effective strategy for optimizing search engines, and is thus also a key technology for E-Com search. While…

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…

Intuitively, an ideal collaborative filtering (CF) model should learn from users' full rankings over all items to make optimal top-K recommendations. Due to the absence of such full rankings in practice, most CF models rely on pairwise loss…

Online matching problems arise in many complex systems, from cloud services and online marketplaces to organ exchange networks, where timely, principled decisions are critical for maintaining high system performance. Traditional heuristics…