English
Related papers

Related papers: Pseudo-Mallows for Efficient Probabilistic Prefere…

200 papers

Learning distributions over permutations is a fundamental problem in machine learning, with applications in ranking, combinatorial optimization, structured prediction, and data association. Existing methods rely on mixtures of parametric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Daniel Severo , Brian Karrer , Niklas Nolte

Preference alignment methods are increasingly critical for steering large language models (LLMs) to generate outputs consistent with human values. While recent approaches often rely on synthetic data generated by LLMs for scalability and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mingye Zhu , Yi Liu , Zheren Fu , Yongdong Zhang , Zhendong Mao

The well-known secretary problem in sequential analysis and optimal stopping theory asks one to maximize the probability of finding the optimal candidate in a sequentially examined list under the constraint that accept/reject decisions are…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-07-13 Xujun Liu , Olgica Milenkovic

This paper addresses the problem of sequential submodular maximization: selecting and ranking items in a sequence to optimize some composite submodular function. In contrast to most of the previous works, which assume access to the utility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Jing Yuan , Shaojie Tang

We present a novel Bayesian topic model for learning discourse-level document structure. Our model leverages insights from discourse theory to constrain latent topic assignments in a way that reflects the underlying organization of document…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2014-01-16 Harr Chen , S. R. K. Branavan , Regina Barzilay , David R. Karger

Machine learning models offer the potential to understand diverse datasets in a data-driven way, powering insights into individual disease experiences and ensuring equitable healthcare. In this study, we explore Bayesian inference for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Beatrice Taylor , Cameron Shand , Chris J. D. Hardy , Neil Oxtoby

When tracking user-specific online activities, each user's preference is revealed in the form of choices and comparisons. For example, a user's purchase history is a record of her choices, i.e. which item was chosen among a subset of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-01 Sahand Negahban , Sewoong Oh , Kiran K. Thekumparampil , Jiaming Xu

In this paper we provide a new efficient algorithm for approximately computing the profile maximum likelihood (PML) distribution, a prominent quantity in symmetric property estimation. We provide an algorithm which matches the previous best…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Nima Anari , Moses Charikar , Kirankumar Shiragur , Aaron Sidford

Utility preference robust optimization (PRO) has recently been proposed to deal with optimal decision making problems where the decision maker's (DM) preference over gains and losses is ambiguous. In this paper, we take a step further to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-11 Jian Hu , Dali Zhang , Huifu Xu , Sainan Zhang

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-10-10 Cristina Mollica , Luca Tardella

With ever-increasing amounts of online information available, modeling and predicting individual preferences-for books or articles, for example-is becoming more and more important. Good predictions enable us to improve advice to users, and…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2017-02-06 Antonia Godoy-Lorite , Roger Guimera , Cristopher Moore , Marta Sales-Pardo

Given data on the choices made by consumers for different offer sets, a key challenge is to develop parsimonious models that describe and predict consumer choice behavior while being amenable to prescriptive tasks such as pricing and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-15 Yanqiu Ruan , Xiaobo Li , Karthyek Murthy , Karthik Natarajan

We develop a Bayesian Poisson matrix factorization model for forming recommendations from sparse user behavior data. These data are large user/item matrices where each user has provided feedback on only a small subset of items, either…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2014-05-21 Prem Gopalan , Jake M. Hofman , David M. Blei

Personalized recommender systems are playing an increasingly important role as more content and services become available and users struggle to identify what might interest them. Although matrix factorization and deep learning based methods…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-01-14 Chen Ma , Liheng Ma , Yingxue Zhang , Ruiming Tang , Xue Liu , Mark Coates

In this paper, we propose a novel ranking framework for collaborative filtering with the overall aim of learning user preferences over items by minimizing a pairwise ranking loss. We show the minimization problem involves dependent random…

Recommender systems predict personalized item rankings based on user preference distributions derived from historical behavior data. Recently, diffusion models (DMs) have gained attention in recommendation for their ability to model complex…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Shuo Liu , An Zhang , Guoqing Hu , Hong Qian , Tat-seng Chua

Estimating statistical models within sensor networks requires distributed algorithms, in which both data and computation are distributed across the nodes of the network. We propose a general approach for distributed learning based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Qiang Liu , Alexander Ihler

A striking result of [Acharya et al. 2017] showed that to estimate symmetric properties of discrete distributions, plugging in the distribution that maximizes the likelihood of observed multiset of frequencies, also known as the profile…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-11-03 Yanjun Han , Kirankumar Shiragur

Recent work has suggested using Monte Carlo methods based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) to sample from target distributions of interest. PDMPs are non-reversible continuous-time processes endowed with momentum, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-28 Paul Fearnhead , Sebastiano Grazzi , Chris Nemeth , Gareth O. Roberts

We propose a scalable Bayesian preference learning method for jointly predicting the preferences of individuals as well as the consensus of a crowd from pairwise labels. Peoples' opinions often differ greatly, making it difficult to predict…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-13 Edwin Simpson , Iryna Gurevych