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Learning the optimal ordering of content is an important challenge in website design. The learning to rank (LTR) framework models this problem as a sequential problem of selecting lists of content and observing where users decide to click.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-12 James A. Grant , David S. Leslie

Clicks on rankings suffer from position-bias: generally items on lower ranks are less likely to be examined - and thus clicked - by users, in spite of their actual preferences between items. The prevalent approach to unbiased click-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Harrie Oosterhuis

Unbiased learning to rank has been proposed to alleviate the biases in the search ranking, making it possible to train ranking models with user interaction data. In real applications, search engines are designed to display only the most…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Haiyuan Zhao , Jun Xu , Xiao Zhang , Guohao Cai , Zhenhua Dong , Ji-Rong Wen

Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Yiteng Tu , Zhichao Xu , Tao Yang , Weihang Su , Yujia Zhou , Yiqun Liu , Fen Lin , Qin Liu , Qingyao Ai

Off-policy learning, referring to the procedure of policy optimization with access only to logged feedback data, has shown importance in various real-world applications, such as search engines, recommender systems, and etc. While the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Xiaoying Zhang , Junpu Chen , Hongning Wang , Hong Xie , Yang Liu , John C. S. Lui , Hang Li

Counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR) aims to learn a ranking policy from user interactions while correcting for the inherent biases in interaction data, such as position bias. Existing CLTR methods assume a single ranking policy that…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Shashank Gupta , Yiming Liao , Maarten de Rijke

Learning to rank (LTR) is widely employed in web searches to prioritize pertinent webpages from retrieved content based on input queries. However, traditional LTR models encounter two principal obstacles that lead to suboptimal performance:…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-09-26 Yuchen Li , Haoyi Xiong , Linghe Kong , Jiang Bian , Shuaiqiang Wang , Guihai Chen , Dawei Yin

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Gaurav Bhatt , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Tanmay Gangwani , Tesi Xiao , Leonid Sigal

As learning-to-rank models are increasingly deployed for decision-making in areas with profound life implications, the FairML community has been developing fair learning-to-rank (LTR) models. These models rely on the availability of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Oluseun Olulana , Kathleen Cachel , Fabricio Murai , Elke Rundensteiner

Probabilistic learning to rank (LTR) has been the dominating approach for optimizing the ranking metric, but cannot maximize long-term rewards. Reinforcement learning models have been proposed to maximize user long-term rewards by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Teng Xiao , Suhang Wang

Optimizing ranking systems based on user interactions is a well-studied problem. State-of-the-art methods for optimizing ranking systems based on user interactions are divided into online approaches - that learn by directly interacting with…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-12-09 Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

Bias is a common problem inherent in recommender systems, which is entangled with users' preferences and poses a great challenge to unbiased learning. For debiasing tasks, the doubly robust (DR) method and its variants show superior…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Haoxuan Li , Yan Lyu , Chunyuan Zheng , Peng Wu

Learning to Rank (LTR) methods generally assume that each document in a top-K ranking is presented in an equal format. However, previous work has shown that users' perceptions of relevance can be changed by varying presentations, i.e.,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Norman Knyazev , Harrie Oosterhuis

In search systems, effectively coordinating the two core objectives of search relevance matching and click-through rate (CTR) prediction is crucial for discovering users' interests and enhancing platform revenue. In our prior work PRECTR,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Shuzhi Cao , Rong Chen , Ailong He , Shuguang Han , Jufeng Chen

Most recommender systems optimize the model on observed interaction data, which is affected by the previous exposure mechanism and exhibits many biases like popularity bias. The loss functions, such as the mostly used pointwise Binary…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-04-27 Qi Wan , Xiangnan He , Xiang Wang , Jiancan Wu , Wei Guo , Ruiming Tang

Learning user preferences for products based on their past purchases or reviews is at the cornerstone of modern recommendation engines. One complication in this learning task is that some users are more likely to purchase products or review…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Wanning Chen , Mohsen Bayati

Modern data-driven recommendation systems risk memorizing sensitive user behavioral patterns, raising privacy concerns. Existing recommendation unlearning methods, while capable of removing target data influence, suffer from inefficient…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Junpeng Zhao , Lin Li , Ming Li , Amran Bhuiyan , Jimmy Huang

Preference learning algorithms (e.g., RLHF and DPO) are frequently used to steer LLMs to produce generations that are more preferred by humans, but our understanding of their inner workings is still limited. In this work, we study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Angelica Chen , Sadhika Malladi , Lily H. Zhang , Xinyi Chen , Qiuyi Zhang , Rajesh Ranganath , Kyunghyun Cho

Because implicit user feedback for the collaborative filtering (CF) models is biased toward popular items, CF models tend to yield recommendation lists with popularity bias. Previous studies have utilized inverse propensity weighting (IPW)…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Jae-woong Lee , Seongmin Park , Mincheol Yoon , Jongwuk Lee

Popular debiased estimation methods for causal inference -- such as augmented inverse propensity weighting and targeted maximum likelihood estimation -- enjoy desirable asymptotic properties like statistical efficiency and double robustness…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-16 Tiffany Tianhui Cai , Yuri Fonseca , Kaiwen Hou , Hongseok Namkoong