Related papers: Robust Generalization and Safe Query-Specializatio…
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become widely-used models for semi-supervised learning. However, the robustness of GNNs in the presence of label noise remains a largely under-explored problem. In this paper, we consider an important yet…
Supervisory signals are a critical resource for training learning to rank models. In many real-world search and retrieval scenarios, these signals may not be readily available or could be costly to obtain for some queries. The examples…
This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application…
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge from retrieved documents, thereby overcoming the limitations of models' static intrinsic knowledge.…
Adversarial attacks on deep-learning models pose a serious threat to their reliability and security. Existing defense mechanisms are narrow addressing a specific type of attack or being vulnerable to sophisticated attacks. We propose a new…
Counterfactual explanations are viewed as an effective way to explain machine learning predictions. This interest is reflected by a relatively young literature with already dozens of algorithms aiming to generate such explanations. These…
We investigate how to train kernel approximation methods that generalize well under a memory budget. Building on recent theoretical work, we define a measure of kernel approximation error which we find to be more predictive of the empirical…
Recurrent neural networks have proven effective in modeling sequential user feedbacks for recommender systems. However, they usually focus solely on item relevance and fail to effectively explore diverse items for users, therefore harming…
Text retrieval plays a crucial role in incorporating factual knowledge for decision making into language processing pipelines, ranging from chat-based web search to question answering systems. Current state-of-the-art text retrieval models…
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…
Massive deployment of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in high-stake applications generates a strong demand for explanations that are robust to noise and align well with human intuition. Most existing methods generate explanations by…
The goal of screening prioritisation in systematic reviews is to identify relevant documents with high recall and rank them in early positions for review. This saves reviewing effort if paired with a stopping criterion, and speeds up review…
Often, the data used to train ranking models is subject to label noise. For example, in web-search, labels created from clickstream data are noisy due to issues such as insufficient information in item descriptions on the SERP, query…
Most artificial intelligence models have limiting ability to solve new tasks faster, without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. The recently emerging paradigm of continual learning aims to solve this issue, in which the model learns…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in document re-ranking, a key component in modern Information Retrieval (IR) systems. However, existing LLM-based approaches face notable limitations, including ranking…
We present a generic and flexible Reinforcement Learning (RL) based meta-learning framework for the problem of few-shot learning. During training, it learns the best optimization algorithm to produce a learner (ranker/classifier, etc) by…
Personalization is a crucial aspect of many online experiences. In particular, content ranking is often a key component in delivering sophisticated personalization results. Commonly, supervised learning-to-rank methods are applied, which…
Unsupervised representation learning (URL), which learns compact embeddings of high-dimensional data without supervision, has made remarkable progress recently. However, the development of URLs for different requirements is independent,…
Attention-based sequential recommendation methods have shown promise in accurately capturing users' evolving interests from their past interactions. Recent research has also explored the integration of reinforcement learning (RL) into these…
Result relevance scoring is critical to e-commerce search user experience. Traditional information retrieval methods focus on keyword matching and hand-crafted or counting-based numeric features, with limited understanding of item semantic…