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Neural ranking models have become increasingly popular for real-world search and recommendation systems in recent years. Unlike their tree-based counterparts, neural models are much less interpretable. That is, it is very difficult to…

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a standard paradigm for safety-critical decision making. However, real-world safety constraints can be complex, subjective, and even hard to explicitly specify. Existing works on constraint inference rely…

Statistical prediction plays an important role in many decision processes such as university budgeting (depending on the number of students who will enroll), capital budgeting (depending on the remaining lifetime of a fleet of systems), the…

Benchmarking is a fundamental practice in machine learning (ML) for comparing the performance of classification algorithms. However, traditional evaluation methods often overlook a critical aspect: the joint consideration of dataset…

Test case prioritisation (TCP) is a critical task in regression testing to ensure quality as software evolves. Machine learning has become a common way to achieve it. In particular, learning-to-rank (LTR) algorithms provide an effective…

There has been substantial progress in the inference of formal behavioural specifications from sample trajectories, for example, using Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). However, these techniques cannot handle specifications that correctly…

The question of aggregating pair-wise comparisons to obtain a global ranking over a collection of objects has been of interest for a very long time: be it ranking of online gamers (e.g. MSR's TrueSkill system) and chess players, aggregating…

In this paper, we develop a new sequential regression modeling approach for data streams. Data streams are commonly found around us, e.g in a retail enterprise sales data is continuously collected every day. A demand forecasting model is an…

In-Context Learning (ICL) is an emergent capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Only a few demonstrations enable LLMs to be used as blackbox for new tasks. Previous studies have shown that using LLMs' outputs as labels is effective in…

The Learning to Rank (L2R) research field has experienced a fast paced growth over the last few years, with a wide variety of benchmark datasets and baselines available for experimentation. We here investigate the main assumption behind…

Ranking is a key aspect of many applications, such as information retrieval, question answering, ad placement and recommender systems. Learning to rank has the goal of estimating a ranking model automatically from training data. In…

Interactive recommender systems (IRS) are increasingly optimized with Reinforcement Learning (RL) to capture the sequential nature of user-system dynamics. However, existing fairness-aware methods often suffer from a fundamental oversight:…

We present the Learned Ranking Function (LRF), a system that takes short-term user-item behavior predictions as input and outputs a slate of recommendations that directly optimizes for long-term user satisfaction. Most previous work is…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant performance gains via scaling up model sizes and/or data. However, recent evidence suggests diminishing returns from such approaches, motivating scaling the computation spent at…

Continuous-time reinforcement learning (CTRL) provides a natural framework for sequential decision-making in dynamic environments where interactions evolve continuously over time. While CTRL has shown growing empirical success, its ability…

The last decade has seen a revolution in the theory and application of machine learning and pattern recognition. Through these advancements, variable ranking has emerged as an active and growing research area and it is now beginning to be…

Unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) aims to mitigate various biases existing in user clicks, such as position bias, trust bias, presentation bias, and learn an effective ranker. In this paper, we introduce our winning approach for the…

Item response theory (IRT) is a non-linear generative probabilistic paradigm for using exams to identify, quantify, and compare latent traits of individuals, relative to their peers, within a population of interest. In pre-existing…

Ranking passages by prompting a large language model (LLM) can achieve promising performance in modern information retrieval (IR) systems. A common approach to sort the ranking list is by prompting LLMs for a pairwise or setwise comparison…

Besides position bias, which has been well-studied, trust bias is another type of bias prevalent in user interactions with rankings: users are more likely to click incorrectly w.r.t. their preferences on highly ranked items because they…