Related papers: Learning-to-Rank at the Speed of Sampling: Placket…

An increasingly important building block of large scale machine learning systems is based on returning slates; an ordered lists of items given a query. Applications of this technology include: search, information retrieval and recommender…

Choice behavior and preferences typically involve numerous and subjective aspects that are difficult to be identified and quantified. For this reason, their exploration is frequently conducted through the collection of ordinal evidence in…

We consider the problem of active coarse ranking, where the goal is to sort items according to their means into clusters of pre-specified sizes, by adaptively sampling from their reward distributions. This setting is useful in many social…

In this paper, we consider a problem of learning supervised PageRank models, which can account for some properties not considered by classical approaches such as the classical PageRank algorithm. Due to huge hidden dimension of the…

Many automated machine learning methods, such as those for hyperparameter and neural architecture optimization, are computationally expensive because they involve training many different model configurations. In this work, we present a new…

Learning models with discrete latent variables using stochastic gradient descent remains a challenge due to the high variance of gradient estimates. Modern variance reduction techniques mostly consider categorical distributions and have…

Supervised learning with large-scale data usually leads to complex optimization problems, especially for classification tasks with multiple classes. Stochastic subgradient methods can enable efficient learning with a large number of samples…

Low-rank approximation of a matrix by means of random sampling has been consistently efficient in its empirical studies by many scientists who applied it with various sparse and structured multipliers, but adequate formal support for this…

Machine learning optimization often depends on stochastic gradient descent, where the precision of gradient estimation is vital for model performance. Gradients are calculated from mini-batches formed by uniformly selecting data samples…

We propose to optimize neural networks with a uniformly-distributed random learning rate. The associated stochastic gradient descent algorithm can be approximated by continuous stochastic equations and analyzed within the Fokker-Planck…

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…

This paper presents an algorithmic framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems using only stochastic function evaluations. We employ central finite-difference based gradient estimation methods to approximate the…

Sorting input objects is an important step in many machine learning pipelines. However, the sorting operator is non-differentiable with respect to its inputs, which prohibits end-to-end gradient-based optimization. In this work, we propose…

In this paper, we propose a stochastic search algorithm for solving general optimization problems with little structure. The algorithm iteratively finds high quality solutions by randomly sampling candidate solutions from a parameterized…

Large language model (LLM) training is often bottlenecked by memory constraints and stochastic gradient noise in extremely high-dimensional parameter spaces. Motivated by empirical evidence that many LLM gradient matrices are effectively…

Mixture models of Plackett-Luce (PL) -- one of the most fundamental ranking models -- are an active research area of both theoretical and practical significance. Most previously proposed parameter estimation algorithms instantiate the EM…

Text retrieval plays a crucial role in incorporating factual knowledge for decision making into language processing pipelines, ranging from chat-based web search to question answering systems. Current state-of-the-art text retrieval models…

We propose a unified framework for estimating low-rank matrices through nonconvex optimization based on gradient descent algorithm. Our framework is quite general and can be applied to both noisy and noiseless observations. In the general…

Classification tasks are usually evaluated in terms of accuracy. However, accuracy is discontinuous and cannot be directly optimized using gradient ascent. Popular methods minimize cross-entropy, hinge loss, or other surrogate losses, which…

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…