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Several methods of preference modeling, ranking, voting and multi-criteria decision making include pairwise comparisons. It is usually simpler to compare two objects at a time, furthermore, some relations (e.g., the outcome of sports…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-04 László Gyarmati , Éva Orbán-Mihálykó , Csaba Mihálykó , Sándor Bozóki , Zsombor Szádoczki

The Bradley-Terry (BT) model is a common and successful practice in reward modeling for Large Language Model (LLM) alignment. However, it remains unclear why this model -- originally developed for multi-player stochastic game matching --…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Hao Sun , Yunyi Shen , Jean-Francois Ton

There are various parametric models for analyzing pairwise comparison data, including the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) and Thurstone models, but their reliance on strong parametric assumptions is limiting. In this work, we study a flexible…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-29 Nihar B. Shah , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Adityanand Guntuboyina , Martin J. Wainwright

We consider the problem of ranking a set of items from pairwise comparisons in the presence of features associated with the items. Recent works have established that $O(n\log(n))$ samples are needed to rank well when there is no feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-10 Aadirupa Saha , Arun Rajkumar

The Bradley-Terry model is widely used for the analysis of pairwise comparison data and, in essence, produces a ranking of the items under comparison. We embed the Bradley-Terry model within a stochastic block model, allowing items to…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-06 Lapo Santi , Nial Friel

Rankings derived from pairwise comparisons are central to many economic and computational systems. In the context of large language models (LLMs), rankings are typically constructed from human preference data and presented as leaderboards…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Angel Rodrigo Avelar Menendez , Yufeng Liu , Xiaowu Dai

PageRank and the Bradley-Terry model are competing approaches to ranking entities such as teams in sports tournaments or journals in citation networks. The Bradley-Terry model is a classical statistical method for ranking based on paired…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-13 David Antony Selby

We explore the top-$K$ rank aggregation problem. Suppose a collection of items is compared in pairs repeatedly, and we aim to recover a consistent ordering that focuses on the top-$K$ ranked items based on partially revealed preference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-15 Minje Jang , Sunghyun Kim , Changho Suh , Sewoong Oh

A number of applications (e.g., AI bot tournaments, sports, peer grading, crowdsourcing) use pairwise comparison data and the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model to evaluate a given collection of items (e.g., bots, teams, students, search…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Jingyan Wang , Nihar B. Shah , R. Ravi

Ranking items based on pairwise comparisons is common, from using match outcomes to rank sports teams to using purchase or survey data to rank consumer products. Statistical inference-based methods such as the Bradley-Terry model, which…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-01-09 Sebastian Morel-Balbi , Alec Kirkley

This paper develops a unified and computationally efficient method for change-point estimation along the time dimension in a non-stationary spatio-temporal process. By modeling a non-stationary spatio-temporal process as a piecewise…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-09 Zifeng Zhao , Ting Fung Ma , Wai Leong Ng , Chun Yip Yau

Change-point detection and locally stationary time series modeling are two major approaches for the analysis of non-stationary data. The former aims to identify stationary phases by detecting abrupt changes in the dynamics of a time series…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-16 Wai Leong Ng , Xinyi Tang , Mun Lau Cheung , Jiacheng Gao , Chun Yip Yau , Holger Dette

This paper addresses the challenges of aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values via preference learning (PL), focusing on incomplete and corrupted data in preference datasets. We propose a novel method for robustly and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Son The Nguyen , Niranjan Uma Naresh , Theja Tulabandhula

Generative, temporal network models play an important role in analyzing the dependence structure and evolution patterns of complex networks. Due to the complicated nature of real network data, it is often naive to assume that the underlying…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-15 Daniel Cirkovic , Tiandong Wang , Xianyang Zhang

This paper deals with the estimation of the unknown distribution of hidden random variables from the observation of pairwise comparisons between these variables. This problem is inspired by recent developments on Bradley-Terry models in…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-08-27 Sylvain Le Corff , Matthieu Lerasle , Elodie Vernet

In this work, we leverage a generative data model considering comparison noise to develop a fast, precise, and informative ranking algorithm from pairwise comparisons that produces a measure of confidence on each comparison. The problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Filipa Valdeira , Cláudia Soares

The dynamic ranking, due to its increasing importance in many applications, is becoming crucial, especially with the collection of voluminous time-dependent data. One such application is sports statistics, where dynamic ranking aids in…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-08 Xin-Yu Tian , Jian Shi , Xiaotong Shen , Kai Song

This paper introduces the Bradley-Terry Regression Trunk model, a novel probabilistic approach for the analysis of preference data expressed through paired comparison rankings. In some cases, it may be reasonable to assume that the…

With the advent of highly capable instruction-tuned neural language models, benchmarking in natural language processing (NLP) is increasingly shifting towards pairwise comparison leaderboards, such as LMSYS Arena, from traditional global…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Georgii Levtsov , Dmitry Ustalov

We propose a time-varying generalization of the Bradley-Terry model that allows for nonparametric modeling of dynamic global rankings of distinct teams. We develop a novel estimator that relies on kernel smoothing to pre-process the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-03-03 Heejong Bong , Wanshan Li , Shamindra Shrotriya , Alessandro Rinaldo