Related papers: ULTRA: An Unbiased Learning To Rank Algorithm Tool…

Position bias is a critical problem in information retrieval when dealing with implicit yet biased user feedback data. Unbiased ranking methods typically rely on causality models and debias the user feedback through inverse propensity…

Nowadays, search ranking and recommendation systems rely on a lot of data to train machine learning models such as Learning-to-Rank (LTR) models to rank results for a given query, and implicit user feedbacks (e.g. click data) have become…

Rankings are the primary interface through which many online platforms match users to items (e.g. news, products, music, video). In these two-sided markets, not only the users draw utility from the rankings, but the rankings also determine…

While implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, dwell times, etc.) is an abundant and attractive source of data for learning to rank, it can produce unfair ranking policies for both exogenous and endogenous reasons. Exogenous reasons typically…

Conventional Learning-to-Rank (LTR) methods optimize the utility of the rankings to the users, but they are oblivious to their impact on the ranked items. However, there has been a growing understanding that the latter is important to…

Modern data-driven recommendation systems risk memorizing sensitive user behavioral patterns, raising privacy concerns. Existing recommendation unlearning methods, while capable of removing target data influence, suffer from inefficient…

As learning-to-rank models are increasingly deployed for decision-making in areas with profound life implications, the FairML community has been developing fair learning-to-rank (LTR) models. These models rely on the availability of…

Unsupervised representation learning approaches aim to learn discriminative feature representations from unlabeled data, without the requirement of annotating every sample. Enabling unsupervised representation learning is extremely crucial…

This paper reports on findings from a comparative study on the effectiveness and efficiency of federated unlearning strategies within Federated Online Learning to Rank (FOLTR), with specific attention to systematically analysing the…

Modern large language models (LLMs) are typically trained and deployed using structured role tags (e.g. system, user, assistant, tool) that explicitly mark the source of each piece of context. While these tags are essential for instruction…

Learning to Rank (LTR) is one of the most widely used machine learning applications. It is a key component in platforms with profound societal impacts, including job search, healthcare information retrieval, and social media content feeds.…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm to solve a range of complex yet specific control tasks. Yet training generalist agents that can quickly adapt to new tasks remains an outstanding challenge. Recent advances…

Ranked search results have become the main mechanism by which we find content, products, places, and people online. Thus their ordering contributes not only to the satisfaction of the searcher, but also to career and business opportunities,…

Learning-to-rank (LTR) is a class of supervised learning techniques that apply to ranking problems dealing with a large number of features. The popularity and widespread application of LTR models in prioritizing information in a variety of…

Online learning to rank is a sequential decision-making problem where in each round the learning agent chooses a list of items and receives feedback in the form of clicks from the user. Many sample-efficient algorithms have been proposed…

Optimizing ranking systems based on user interactions is a well-studied problem. State-of-the-art methods for optimizing ranking systems based on user interactions are divided into online approaches - that learn by directly interacting with…

Pairwise debiasing is one of the most effective strategies in reducing position bias in learning-to-rank (LTR) models. However, limiting the scope of this strategy, are the underlying assumptions required by many pairwise debiasing…

Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

The goal of Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning (URL) is to find a reward-agnostic prior policy on a task domain, such that the sample-efficiency on supervised downstream tasks is improved. Although agents initialized with such a prior…

The pervasive deployment of large language models (LLMs) in conversational AI systems has revolutionized information access, yet their propensity for generating factually unsupported or hallucinated responses remains a critical impediment…