Related papers: Shallow pooling for sparse labels
Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and intents critically involves the use of human or AI feedback. While dense feedback annotations are expensive to acquire and integrate, sparse feedback presents a structural design…
We study the problem of learning to rank from pairwise preferences, and solve a long-standing open problem that has led to development of many heuristics but no provable results for our particular problem. Given a set $V$ of $n$ elements,…
Traditional approaches to ranking in web search follow the paradigm of rank-by-score: a learned function gives each query-URL combination an absolute score and URLs are ranked according to this score. This paradigm ensures that if the score…
Automated scoring of student responses to open-ended questions, including short-answer questions, has great potential to scale to a large number of responses. Recent approaches for automated scoring rely on supervised learning, i.e.,…
Neural retrieval models excel in Web search, but their training requires substantial amounts of labeled query-document pairs, which are costly to obtain. With the widespread availability of Web document collections like ClueWeb22, synthetic…
Search engines answer users' queries by listing relevant items (e.g. documents, songs, products, web pages, ...). These engines rely on algorithms that learn to rank items so as to present an ordered list maximizing the probability that it…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves multimodal reasoning by rewarding verifiable final answers. Yet answer-correct trajectories may still rely on incomplete derivations, weak evidence, or statements that…
Axiomatic information retrieval (IR) seeks a set of principle properties desirable in IR models. These properties when formally expressed provide guidance in the search for better relevance estimation functions. Neural ranking models…
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…
Answering multiple-choice questions in a setting in which no supporting documents are explicitly provided continues to stand as a core problem in natural language processing. The contribution of this article is two-fold. First, it describes…
Preference-based alignment objectives have been widely adopted, from RLHF-style pairwise learning in large language models to emerging applications in recommender systems. Yet, existing work rarely examines how Direct Preference…
Ranking algorithms are deployed widely to order a set of items in applications such as search engines, news feeds, and recommendation systems. Recent studies, however, have shown that, left unchecked, the output of ranking algorithms can…
Sequential recommendation has increasingly shifted toward generative recommenders that combine sequential patterns with semantic item information. Yet these methods are often evaluated on a small set of widely used benchmarks, raising a key…
Document reranking is a key component in information retrieval (IR), aimed at refining initial retrieval results to improve ranking quality for downstream tasks. Recent studies--motivated by large reasoning models (LRMs)--have begun…
In light of recent data science trends, new interest has fallen in alternative matrix factorizations. By this, we mean various ways of factorizing particular data matrices so that the factors have special properties and reveal insights into…
We study online preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) with the goal of improving sample efficiency. While a growing body of theoretical work has emerged-motivated by PbRL's recent empirical success, particularly in aligning large…
Traditional information retrieval (IR) ranking models process the full text of documents. Newer models based on Transformers, however, would incur a high computational cost when processing long texts, so typically use only snippets from the…
Text classification has long been a staple within Natural Language Processing (NLP) with applications spanning across diverse areas such as sentiment analysis, recommender systems and spam detection. With such a powerful solution, it is…
The problem of relevance ranking consists of sorting a set of objects with respect to a given criterion. Since users may prefer different relevance criteria, the ranking algorithms should be adaptable to the user needs. Two main approaches…
Pairwise human-preference platforms such as Chatbot Arena have become central to large language model (LLM) evaluation, yet reliable task-specific ranking remains challenging. Global leaderboards mask task heterogeneity, while ranking each…