Related papers: Ranking from Pairwise Comparisons in General Graph…
Learning-to-Rank (LTR) is a supervised machine learning approach that constructs models specifically designed to order a set of items or documents based on their relevance or importance to a given query or context. Despite significant…
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…
We consider Bayesian estimation of a $p\times p$ precision matrix, when $p$ can be much larger than the available sample size $n$. It is well known that consistent estimation in such ultra-high dimensional situations requires regularization…
Ranking a vector of alternatives on the basis of a series of paired comparisons is a relevant topic in many instances. A popular example is ranking contestants in sport tournaments. To this purpose, paired comparison models such as the…
Many of the existing approaches to assess and predict the performance of players, teams or products in competitive contests rely on the assumption that comparisons occur between pairs of such entities. There are, however, several real…
A common problem faced in statistical inference is drawing conclusions from paired comparisons, in which two objects compete and one is declared the victor. A probabilistic approach to such a problem is the Bradley-Terry model, first…
Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on open-ended tasks without ground-truth labels is increasingly done via the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm. A critical but under-modeled issue is that judge LLMs differ substantially in reliability;…
Given pairwise comparisons between multiple items, how to rank them so that the ranking matches the observations? This problem, known as rank aggregation, has found many applications in sports, recommendation systems, and other web…
While the promises of Multi-Task Learning (MTL) are attractive, characterizing the conditions of its success is still an open problem in Deep Learning. Some tasks may benefit from being learned together while others may be detrimental to…
We investigate the generalizability of learned binary relations: functions that map pairs of instances to a logical indicator. This problem has application in numerous areas of machine learning, such as ranking, entity resolution and link…
A simple generative model for rank ordered data with ties is presented. The model is based on ordering geometric latent variables and can be seen as the discrete counterpart of the Plackett-Luce (PL) model, a popular, relatively tractable…
The maximum likelihood threshold (MLT) of a graph $G$ is the minimum number of samples to almost surely guarantee existence of the maximum likelihood estimate in the corresponding Gaussian graphical model. We give a new characterization of…
For a broad class of models widely used in practice for choice and ranking data based on Luce's choice axiom, including the Bradley--Terry--Luce and Plackett--Luce models, we show that the associated maximum likelihood estimation problems…
The Plackett-Luce (PL) model is ubiquitous in learning-to-rank (LTR) because it provides a useful and intuitive probabilistic model for sampling ranked lists. Counterfactual offline evaluation and optimization of ranking metrics are pivotal…
Although deep learning models have driven state-of-the-art performance on a wide array of tasks, they are prone to spurious correlations that should not be learned as predictive clues. To mitigate this problem, we propose a causality-based…
Maximum likelihood is the most widely used statistical estimation technique. Recent work by the authors introduced a general methodology for the construction of estimators for functionals in parametric models, and demonstrated improvements…
Assuming we have iid observations from two unknown probability density functions (pdfs), $p$ and $q$, the likelihood-ratio estimation (LRE) is an elegant approach to compare the two pdfs only by relying on the available data. In this paper,…
Learning to rank is an effective recommendation approach since its introduction around 2010. Famous algorithms such as Bayesian Personalized Ranking and Collaborative Less is More Filtering have left deep impact in both academia and…
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…
The stable marriage problem with incomplete lists and ties (SMTI) and the hospitals/residents problem with ties (HRT) are important in matching theory with broad practical applications. In this paper, we introduce a tie-breaking based local…