Related papers: Inference-time Stochastic Ranking with Risk Contro…
Stochastic learning to rank (LTR) is a recent branch in the LTR field that concerns the optimization of probabilistic ranking models. Their probabilistic behavior enables certain ranking qualities that are impossible with deterministic…
Unbiased Learning to Rank (ULTR) aims to train unbiased ranking models from biased click logs, by explicitly modeling a generation process for user behavior and fitting click data based on examination hypothesis. Previous research found…
Implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, dwell times, etc.) is an abundant source of data in human-interactive systems. While implicit feedback has many advantages (e.g., it is inexpensive to collect, user centric, and timely), its inherent biases…
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…
Fairness of exposure is a commonly used notion of fairness for ranking systems. It is based on the idea that all items or item groups should get exposure proportional to the merit of the item or the collective merit of the items in the…
Item Response Theory (IRT) has been widely used in educational psychometrics to assess student ability, as well as the difficulty and discrimination of test questions. In this context, discrimination specifically refers to how effectively a…
It is a well-known challenge to learn an unbiased ranker with biased feedback. Unbiased learning-to-rank(LTR) algorithms, which are verified to model the relative relevance accurately based on noisy feedback, are appealing candidates and…
Ranking algorithms as an essential component of retrieval systems have been constantly improved in previous studies, especially regarding relevance-based utilities. In recent years, more and more research attempts have been proposed…
Counterfactual Learning to Rank (LTR) methods optimize ranking systems using logged user interactions that contain interaction biases. Existing methods are only unbiased if users are presented with all relevant items in every ranking. There…
The goal of unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) is to leverage implicit user feedback for optimizing learning-to-rank systems. Among existing solutions, automatic ULTR algorithms that jointly learn user bias models (i.e., propensity models)…
The learning-to-rank problem aims at ranking items to maximize exposure of those most relevant to a user query. A desirable property of such ranking systems is to guarantee some notion of fairness among specified item groups. While fairness…
Ranked search results have become the main mechanism by which we find content, products, places, and people online. Thus their ordering contributes not only to the satisfaction of the searcher, but also to career and business opportunities,…
Online learning to rank (OL2R) has attracted great research interests in recent years, thanks to its advantages in avoiding expensive relevance labeling as required in offline supervised ranking model learning. Such a solution explores the…
We propose a novel combinatorial inference framework to conduct general uncertainty quantification in ranking problems. We consider the widely adopted Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model, where each item is assigned a positive preference score…
In-context learning (ICL) adapts large language models by conditioning on a small set of ICL examples, avoiding costly parameter updates. Among other factors, performance is often highly sensitive to the ordering of the examples. However,…
Presentation bias is one of the key challenges when learning from implicit feedback in search engines, as it confounds the relevance signal with uninformative signals due to position in the ranking, saliency, and other presentation factors.…
Although the foundations of ranking are well established, the ranking literature has primarily been focused on simple, unimodal models, e.g. the Mallows and Plackett-Luce models, that define distributions centered around a single total…
As Large Language Model (LLM) integration has accelerated in high-stakes domains, model hallucination is a critical issue. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a technique for addressing hallucination; however, RAG's multi-component…
Ranking systems in web search and recommendation allocate attention among items and providers, and therefore need to balance relevance-based effectiveness with provider fairness. Existing fair-ranking methods commonly focus on exposure…
Learning to Rank (LTR) technique is ubiquitous in the Information Retrieval system nowadays, especially in the Search Ranking application. The query-item relevance labels typically used to train the ranking model are often noisy…