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Related papers: Human Preferences as Dueling Bandits

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Analogical reasoning depends fundamentally on the ability to learn and generalize about relations between objects. We develop an approach to relational learning which, given a set of pairs of objects…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-08-30 Ricardo Silva , Katherine Heller , Zoubin Ghahramani , Edoardo M. Airoldi

Most modern systems strive to learn from interactions with users, and many engage in exploration: making potentially suboptimal choices for the sake of acquiring new information. We initiate a study of the interplay between exploration and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-11-21 Yishay Mansour , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Zhiwei Steven Wu

We explore the fundamental problem of sorting through the lens of learning-augmented algorithms, where algorithms can leverage possibly erroneous predictions to improve their efficiency. We consider two different settings: In the first…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Xingjian Bai , Christian Coester

A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Xiao Xu , Fang Dong , Yanghua Li , Shaojian He , Xin Li

Multi-dueling bandits, where a learner selects $m \geq 2$ arms per round and observes only the winner, arise naturally in many applications including ranking and recommendation systems, yet a fundamental question has remained open: can a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 S Akash , Pratik Gajane , Jawar Singh

Motivated by problems of learning to rank long item sequences, we introduce a variant of the cascading bandit model that considers flexible length sequences with varying rewards and losses. We formulate two generative models for this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-05 Anirban Santara , Claudio Gentile , Gaurav Aggarwal , Shuai Li

With the recent advances of conversational recommendations, the recommender system is able to actively and dynamically elicit user preference via conversational interactions. To achieve this, the system periodically queries users'…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Zhihui Xie , Tong Yu , Canzhe Zhao , Shuai Li

As an important psychological and social experiment, the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) treats the choice to cooperate or defect as an atomic action. We propose to study the behaviors of online learning algorithms in the Iterated…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Baihan Lin , Djallel Bouneffouf , Guillermo Cecchi

We propose a new problem setting to study the sequential interactions between a recommender system and a user. Instead of assuming the user is omniscient, static, and explicit, as the classical practice does, we sketch a more realistic user…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-08 Fan Yao , Chuanhao Li , Denis Nekipelov , Hongning Wang , Haifeng Xu

We present a new recommendation setting for picking out two items from a given set to be highlighted to a user, based on contextual input. These two items are presented to a user who chooses one of them, possibly stochastically, with a bias…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-26 Daniel Barsky , Koby Crammer

We consider sequential decision making under uncertainty, where the goal is to optimize over a large decision space using noisy comparative feedback. This problem can be formulated as a $K$-armed Dueling Bandits problem where $K$ is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-11 Yanan Sui , Yisong Yue , Joel W. Burdick

There are three fundamental asks from a ranking algorithm: it should scale to handle a large number of items, sort items accurately by their utility, and impose a total order on the items for logical consistency. But here's the catch-no…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Malay Haldar , Daochen Zha , Huiji Gao , Liwei He , Sanjeev Katariya

Learning human preferences in language models remains fundamentally challenging, as reward modeling relies on subtle, subjective comparisons or shades of gray rather than clear-cut labels. This study investigates the limits of current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Simona-Vasilica Oprea , Adela Bâra

We consider the problem of probably approximately correct (PAC) ranking $n$ items by adaptively eliciting subset-wise preference feedback. At each round, the learner chooses a subset of $k$ items and observes stochastic feedback indicating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-06 Aadirupa Saha , Aditya Gopalan

In this paper we consider the adversarial contextual bandit problem in metric spaces. The paper "Nearest neighbour with bandit feedback" tackled this problem but when there are many contexts near the decision boundary of the comparator…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Stephen Pasteris , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

Link prediction is a critical problem in graph learning with broad applications such as recommender systems and knowledge graph completion. Numerous research efforts have been directed at solving this problem, including approaches based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Yikun Ban , Jiaru Zou , Zihao Li , Yunzhe Qi , Dongqi Fu , Jian Kang , Hanghang Tong , Jingrui He

Discovering relevant patterns for a particular user remains a challenging tasks in data mining. Several approaches have been proposed to learn user-specific pattern ranking functions. These approaches generalize well, but at the expense of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Nassim Belmecheri , Noureddine Aribi , Nadjib Lazaar , Yahia Lebbah , Samir Loudni

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Or Sheffet , Nina Mishra , Samuel Ieong

In sequential recommendation, models recommend items based on user's interaction history. To this end, current models usually incorporate information such as item descriptions and user intent or preferences. User preferences are usually not…

Preference alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly improved their ability to adhere to human instructions and intentions. However, existing direct alignment algorithms primarily focus on relative preferences and often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Shenao Zhang , Zhihan Liu , Boyi Liu , Yufeng Zhang , Yingxiang Yang , Yongfei Liu , Liyu Chen , Tao Sun , Zhaoran Wang