Related papers: Offline Retrieval Evaluation Without Evaluation Me…

In Recommender System (RS), explanations help users understand why items are recommended and can enhance a system's transparency, persuasiveness, engagement, and trust, which are known as explanation goals. However, evaluating the…

Offline reinforcement learning refers to the process of learning policies from fixed datasets, without requiring additional environment interaction. However, it often relies on well-defined reward functions, which are difficult and…

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn a near-optimal policy from a fixed dataset of transitions collected by another policy. This problem has attracted a lot of attention recently, but most existing methods with strong…

Generally speaking, the model training for recommender systems can be based on two types of data, namely explicit feedback and implicit feedback. Moreover, because of its general availability, we see wide adoption of implicit feedback data,…

Performance evaluation in multimedia retrieval, as in the information retrieval domain at large, relies heavily on retrieval experiments, employing a broad range of techniques and metrics. These can involve human-in-the-loop and…

Recommender systems are information retrieval methods that predict user preferences to personalize services. These systems use the feedback and the ratings provided by users to model the behavior of users and to generate recommendations.…

Evaluating the quality of search, ranking and RAG systems traditionally requires a significant number of human relevance annotations. In recent times, several deployed systems have explored the usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) as…

Recommender systems are expected to be assistants that help human users find relevant information automatically without explicit queries. As recommender systems evolve, increasingly sophisticated learning techniques are applied and have…

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is crucial for personalized online services. Sample-level retrieval-based models, such as RIM, have demonstrated remarkable performance. However, they face challenges including inference inefficiency and…

Recommendation systems leverage user interaction data to suggest relevant items while filtering out irrelevant (negative) ones. The rise of large language models (LLMs) has garnered increasing attention for their potential in recommendation…

Existing online learning to rank (OL2R) solutions are limited to linear models, which are incompetent to capture possible non-linear relations between queries and documents. In this work, to unleash the power of representation learning in…

In an era dominated by information overload, effective recommender systems are essential for managing the deluge of data across digital platforms. Multi-stage cascade ranking systems are widely used in the industry, with retrieval and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been applied to reranking tasks in information retrieval, achieving strong performance. However, their high computational demands often hinder practical deployment. Existing studies evaluate the…

How to select between policies and value functions produced by different training algorithms in offline reinforcement learning (RL) -- which is crucial for hyperpa-rameter tuning -- is an important open question. Existing approaches based…

Online linear programming (OLP) has found broad applications in revenue management and resource allocation. State-of-the-art OLP algorithms achieve low regret by repeatedly solving linear programming (LP) subproblems that incorporate…

Though it has been recognized that recommending serendipitous (i.e., surprising and relevant) items can be helpful for increasing users' satisfaction and behavioral intention, how to measure serendipity in the offline environment is still…

LLM-based shopping agents increasingly rely on long purchase histories and multi-turn interactions for personalization, yet naively appending raw history to prompts is often ineffective due to noise, length, and relevance mismatch. We…

Dense retrieval has made significant advancements in information retrieval (IR) by achieving high levels of effectiveness while maintaining online efficiency during a single-pass retrieval process. However, the application of pseudo…

Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…

Traditional ranking systems optimize offline proxy objectives that rely on oversimplified assumptions about user behavior, often neglecting factors such as position bias and item diversity. Consequently, these models fail to improve true…