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This paper studies human preference learning based on partially revealed choice behavior and formulates the problem as a generalized Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) ranking model that accounts for heterogeneous preferences. Specifically, we assume…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-03 Jianqing Fan , Hyukjun Kwon , Xiaonan Zhu

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

Rankings and ratings are commonly used to express preferences but provide distinct and complementary information. Rankings give ordinal and scale-free comparisons but lack granularity; ratings provide cardinal and granular assessments but…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-25 Michael Pearce , Elena A. Erosheva

This paper considers the problem of ranking objects based on their latent merits using data from pairwise interactions. We allow for incomplete observation of these interactions and study what can be inferred about rankings in such…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-09-23 Federico Crippa , Danil Fedchenko

One of the most common methods for statistical inference is the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE). The MLE needs to compute the normalization constant in statistical models, and it is often intractable. Using unnormalized statistical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-04-26 Takafumi Kanamori , Takashi Takenouchi

Ranking or assessing centrality in multivariate and non-Euclidean data is difficult because there is no canonical order and many depth notions become computationally fragile in high-dimensional or structured settings. We introduce a…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-24 Lingfeng Lyu , Doudou Zhou

We measure LLMs' output error at pairwise text comparison, noting the probability of error in their preferences. Our method does not rely on the ground truth and supports two scenarios: (i) uniform error rate regardless of the order of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Tianyi Li

We consider data in the form of pairwise comparisons of n items, with the goal of precisely identifying the top k items for some value of k < n, or alternatively, recovering a ranking of all the items. We analyze the Copeland counting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-28 Nihar B. Shah , Martin J. Wainwright

We study the problem of ranking a set of items from nonactively chosen pairwise preferences where each item has feature information with it. We propose and characterize a very broad class of preference matrices giving rise to the Feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-10 U. N. Niranjan , Arun Rajkumar

We consider the problem of optimal recovery of true ranking of $n$ items from a randomly chosen subset of their pairwise preferences. It is well known that without any further assumption, one requires a sample size of $\Omega(n^2)$ for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-13 Aadirupa Saha , Rakesh Shivanna , Chiranjib Bhattacharyya

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial in ensuring desirable and controllable model behaviors. Current methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Yang Zhao , Yixin Wang , Mingzhang Yin

Pairwise human-preference platforms such as Chatbot Arena have become central to large language model (LLM) evaluation, yet reliable task-specific ranking remains challenging. Global leaderboards mask task heterogeneity, while ranking each…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-29 Jiachun Li , David Simchi-Levi , Will Wei Sun

This paper explores the adaptive (active) PAC (probably approximately correct) top-$k$ ranking (i.e., top-$k$ item selection) and total ranking problems from $l$-wise ($l\geq 2$) comparisons under the multinomial logit (MNL) model. By…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-11 Wenbo Ren , Jia Liu , Ness B. Shroff

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 rating of items based on pairwise comparisons has been a topic of statistical investigation for many decades. Numerous approaches have been proposed. One of the best known is the Bradley-Terry model. This paper seeks to assemble and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-08-08 Ian Hamilton , Nick Tawn , David Firth

Markov networks are widely studied and used throughout multivariate statistics and computer science. In particular, the problem of learning the structure of Markov networks from data without invoking chordality assumptions in order to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-29 Juri Kuronen , Jukka Corander , Johan Pensar

We investigate the Plackett-Luce (PL) model based listwise learning-to-rank (LTR) on data with partitioned preference, where a set of items are sliced into ordered and disjoint partitions, but the ranking of items within a partition is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Jiaqi Ma , Xinyang Yi , Weijing Tang , Zhe Zhao , Lichan Hong , Ed H. Chi , Qiaozhu Mei

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

We introduce a general covariate-assisted statistical ranking model within the Plackett--Luce framework. Unlike previous studies focusing on individual effects with fixed covariates, our model allows covariates to vary across comparisons.…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-20 Pinjun Dong , Ruijian Han , Binyan Jiang , Yiming Xu

The "Local Ranking Problem" (LRP) is related to the computation of a centrality-like rank on a local graph, where the scores of the nodes could significantly differ from the ones computed on the global graph. Previous work has studied LRP…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-05-26 Michele Trevisiol , Luca Maria Aiello , Paolo Boldi , Roi Blanco