Related papers: Shallow pooling for sparse labels
Medical systematic reviews typically require assessing all the documents retrieved by a search. The reason is two-fold: the task aims for ``total recall''; and documents retrieved using Boolean search are an unordered set, and thus it is…
Sparse coding, which represents a data point as a sparse reconstruction code with regard to a dictionary, has been a popular data representation method. Meanwhile, in database retrieval problems, learning the ranking scores from data points…
We investigate the exploitation of both lexical and neural relevance signals for ad-hoc passage retrieval. Our exploration involves a large-scale training dataset in which dense neural representations of MS-MARCO queries and passages are…
Interactions between search and recommendation have recently attracted significant attention, and several studies have shown that many potential applications involve with a joint problem of producing recommendations to users with respect to…
Recent developments in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) allow large language models (LLMs) to function as implicit ranking models by maximizing the margin between preferred and non-preferred responses. In practice, user feedback on such…
Reward models (RMs) play a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, noisy preferences in human feedback can lead to reward misgeneralization - a phenomenon where reward models learn spurious…
Relevance labels, which indicate whether a search result is valuable to a searcher, are key to evaluating and optimising search systems. The best way to capture the true preferences of users is to ask them for their careful feedback on…
Sequential Recommender Systems (SRSs) are widely employed to model user behavior over time. However, their robustness in the face of perturbations in training data remains a largely understudied yet critical issue. A fundamental challenge…
At the present time, sequential item recommendation models are compared by calculating metrics on a small item subset (target set) to speed up computation. The target set contains the relevant item and a set of negative items that are…
Best-of-n sampling improves the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) and large reasoning models (LRMs) by generating multiple candidate solutions and selecting the one with the highest reward. The key challenge for reasoning tasks is…
Reinforcement learning has become the standard for improving reasoning in large language models, yet evidence increasingly suggests that RL does not teach new strategies; it redistributes probability mass over solutions the base model…
Process Reward Models (PRMs) have achieved strong results in complex reasoning, but are bottlenecked by costly process-level supervision. A widely used alternative, Monte Carlo Estimation (MCE), defines process rewards as the probability…
Recent advances in neuroimaging analysis have enabled accurate decoding of mental state from brain activation patterns during functional magnetic resonance imaging scans. A commonly applied tool for this purpose is principal components…
A ranking is an ordered sequence of items, in which an item with higher ranking score is more preferred than the items with lower ranking scores. In many information systems, rankings are widely used to represent the preferences over a set…
Though the statistical analysis of ranking data has been a subject of interest over the past centuries, especially in economics, psychology or social choice theory, it has been revitalized in the past 15 years by recent applications such as…
Active learning is commonly used to train label-efficient models by adaptively selecting the most informative queries. However, most active learning strategies are designed to either learn a representation of the data (e.g., embedding or…
Neural document ranking approaches, specifically transformer models, have achieved impressive gains in ranking performance. However, query processing using such over-parameterized models is both resource and time intensive. In this paper,…
Ranking data arises in a wide variety of application areas but remains difficult to model, learn from, and predict. Datasets often exhibit multimodality, intransitivity, or incomplete rankings---particularly when generated by humans---yet…
Most efforts in interpreting neural relevance models have focused on local explanations, which explain the relevance of a document to a query but are not useful in predicting the model's behavior on unseen query-document pairs. We propose a…
Search systems often employ a re-ranking pipeline, wherein documents (or passages) from an initial pool of candidates are assigned new ranking scores. The process enables the use of highly-effective but expensive scoring functions that are…