Related papers: SmoothI: Smooth Rank Indicators for Differentiable…
The growing prevalence of nonsmooth optimization problems in machine learning has spurred significant interest in generalized smoothness assumptions. Among these, the (L0, L1)-smoothness assumption has emerged as one of the most prominent.…
For ambiguous queries, conventional retrieval systems are bound by two conflicting goals. On the one hand, they should diversify and strive to present results for as many query intents as possible. On the other hand, they should provide…
In this article, we consider the problem of approximating a finite set of data (usually huge in applications) by invariant subspaces generated through a small set of smooth functions. The invariance is either by translations under a…
This paper concerns a deep learning approach to relevance ranking in information retrieval (IR). Existing deep IR models such as DSSM and CDSSM directly apply neural networks to generate ranking scores, without explicit understandings of…
The study of IR evaluation metrics through axiomatic analysis enables a better understanding of their numerical properties. Some works have modelled the effectiveness of retrieval metrics with axioms that capture desirable properties on the…
Large-scale pre-trained language models have shown outstanding performance in a variety of NLP tasks. However, they are also known to be significantly brittle against specifically crafted adversarial examples, leading to increasing interest…
We consider the unconstrained optimization problem whose objective function is composed of a smooth and a non-smooth conponents where the smooth component is the expectation a random function. This type of problem arises in some interesting…
Rank-based metrics are some of the most widely used criteria for performance evaluation of computer vision models. Despite years of effort, direct optimization for these metrics remains a challenge due to their non-differentiable and…
Plackett-Luce gradient estimation enables the optimization of stochastic ranking models within feasible time constraints through sampling techniques. Unfortunately, the computational complexity of existing methods does not scale well with…
Low-rank and nonsmooth matrix optimization problems capture many fundamental tasks in statistics and machine learning. While significant progress has been made in recent years in developing efficient methods for \textit{smooth} low-rank…
This paper reviews the gradient sampling methodology for solving nonsmooth, nonconvex optimization problems. An intuitively straightforward gradient sampling algorithm is stated and its convergence properties are summarized. Throughout this…
We study the query complexity of sampling from high-dimensional Gaussian distributions using gradient information. In the standard oracle model, exact gradients expose only matrix-vector products with the precision matrix, leading to…
The vocabulary gap is a core challenge in information retrieval (IR). In e-commerce applications like product search, the vocabulary gap is reported to be a bigger challenge than in more traditional application areas in IR, such as news…
This paper is concerned with the nonparametric item response theory (NIRT) for estimating item characteristic curves (ICCs) and latent abilities of examinees on educational and psychological tests. In contrast to parametric models, NIRT…
The main approach of traditional information retrieval (IR) is to examine how many words from a query appear in a document. A drawback of this approach, however, is that it may fail to detect relevant documents where no or only few words…
For the composite multi-objective optimization problem composed of two nonsmooth terms, a smoothing method is used to overcome the nonsmoothness of the objective function, making the objective function contain at most one nonsmooth term.…
Recently, diffusion models have made remarkable progress in text-to-image (T2I) generation, synthesizing images with high fidelity and diverse contents. Despite this advancement, latent space smoothness within diffusion models remains…
This paper presents novel methods for estimating certified radii in randomized smoothing, a technique crucial for certifying the robustness of neural networks against adversarial perturbations. Our proposed techniques significantly improve…
Information retrieval (IR) in dynamic data streams is a crucial task, as shifts in data distribution degrade the performance of AI-powered IR systems. To mitigate this issue, memory-based continual learning has been widely adopted for IR.…
Listwise learning-to-rank methods form a powerful class of ranking algorithms that are widely adopted in applications such as information retrieval. These algorithms learn to rank a set of items by optimizing a loss that is a function of…