Related papers: Learning to Truncate Ranked Lists for Information …

Work in information retrieval has traditionally focused on ranking and relevance: given a query, return some number of results ordered by relevance to the user. However, the problem of determining how many results to return, i.e. how to…

The results of information retrieval (IR) are usually presented in the form of a ranked list of candidate documents, such as web search for humans and retrieval-augmented generation for large language models (LLMs). List-aware retrieval…

Large Language Models (LLM) have been widely used in reranking. Computational overhead and large context lengths remain a challenging issue for LLM rerankers. Efficient reranking usually involves selecting a subset of the ranked list from…

We study ranked list truncation (RLT) from a novel "retrieve-then-re-rank" perspective, where we optimize re-ranking by truncating the retrieved list (i.e., trim re-ranking candidates). RLT is crucial for re-ranking as it can improve…

Tool learning aims to extend the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with external tools. A major challenge in tool learning is how to support a large number of tools, including unseen tools. To address this challenge, previous…

Work in information retrieval has largely been centered around ranking and relevance: given a query, return some number of results ordered by relevance to the user. The problem of result list truncation, or where to truncate the ranked list…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong promise as rerankers, especially in ``listwise'' settings where an LLM is prompted to rerank several search results at once. However, this ``cascading'' retrieve-and-rerank approach is limited…

Learning-to-Rank (LTR) is a supervised machine learning approach that constructs models specifically designed to order a set of items or documents based on their relevance or importance to a given query or context. Despite significant…

We propose Top-N-Rank, a novel family of list-wise Learning-to-Rank models for reliably recommending the N top-ranked items. The proposed models optimize a variant of the widely used discounted cumulative gain (DCG) objective function which…

Listwise reranking with large language models (LLMs) enhances top-ranked results in retrieval-based applications. Due to the limit in context size and high inference cost of long context, reranking is typically performed over a fixed size…

Traditional machine-learned ranking systems for web search are often trained to capture stationary relevance of documents to queries, which has limited ability to track non-stationary user intention in a timely manner. In recency search,…

Ranking is a core task in recommender systems, which aims at providing an ordered list of items to users. Typically, a ranking function is learned from the labeled dataset to optimize the global performance, which produces a ranking score…

In a number of information retrieval applications (e.g., patent search, literature review, due diligence, etc.), preventing false negatives is more important than preventing false positives. However, approaches designed to reduce review…

Modern retrieval systems are often driven by an underlying machine learning model. The goal of such systems is to identify and possibly rank the few most relevant items for a given query or context. Thus, such systems are typically…

In this paper, we propose new listwise learning-to-rank models that mitigate the shortcomings of existing ones. Existing listwise learning-to-rank models are generally derived from the classical Plackett-Luce model, which has three major…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of information retrieval, particularly for reranking. Listwise LLM rerankers have showcased superior performance and generalizability compared to existing supervised…

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex reasoning tasks through extended chain-of-thought generation, but their reliance on lengthy intermediate steps incurs substantial computational cost. We find that the entropy of the model's…

Reinforcement learning has emerged as an effective paradigm for training large language models to interleave reasoning with search engine calls. However, existing approaches face a fundamental credit assignment problem: methods like…

Recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of gradient descent for directly recovering the factors of low-rank matrices from random linear measurements in a globally convergent manner when initialized properly. However, the performance…

Adequate evaluation of an information retrieval system to estimate future performance is a crucial task. Area under the ROC curve (AUC) is widely used to evaluate the generalization of a retrieval system. However, the objective function…