Related papers: Lower-Left Partial AUC: An Effective and Efficient…
Learning recommender systems with multi-class optimization objective is a prevalent setting in recommendation. However, as observed user feedback often accounts for a tiny fraction of the entire item pool, the standard Softmax loss tends to…
Robust topology optimization (RTO), as a class of topology optimization problems, identifies a design with the best average performance while reducing the response sensitivity to input uncertainties, e.g. load uncertainty. Solving RTO is…
Semi-supervised ordinal regression (S$^2$OR) problems are ubiquitous in real-world applications, where only a few ordered instances are labeled and massive instances remain unlabeled. Recent researches have shown that directly optimizing…
The area under the ROC curve (AUROC) has been vigorously applied for imbalanced classification and moreover combined with deep learning techniques. However, there is no existing work that provides sound information for peers to choose…
The Area Under Curve measure (AUC) seems apt to evaluate and compare diverse models, possibly without calibration. An important example of AUC application is the evaluation and benchmarking of models that predict faithfulness of generated…
Low-rank approximation of a matrix by means of random sampling has been consistently efficient in its empirical studies by many scientists who applied it with various sparse and structured multipliers, but adequate formal support for this…
Recent multi-task learning studies suggest that linear scalarization, when using well-chosen fixed task weights, can achieve comparable to or even better performance than complex multi-task optimization (MTO) methods. It remains unclear why…
In this paper, we study multi-block min-max bilevel optimization problems, where the upper level is non-convex strongly-concave minimax objective and the lower level is a strongly convex objective, and there are multiple blocks of dual…
A novel stochastic optimization method called MAC was suggested. The method is based on the calculation of the objective function at several random points and then an empirical expected value and an empirical covariance matrix are…
The integration of reinforcement learning (RL) into large language models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities for recommender systems by eliciting reasoning and improving user preference modeling. However, RL-based LLM recommendation faces…
Local optimization presents a promising approach to expensive, high-dimensional black-box optimization by sidestepping the need to globally explore the search space. For objective functions whose gradient cannot be evaluated directly,…
In this paper, we introduce a powerful and efficient framework for direct optimization of ranking metrics. The problem is ill-posed due to the discrete structure of the loss, and to deal with that, we introduce two important techniques:…
Randomized Uphill Climbing is a lightweight, stochastic search heuristic that has delivered state of the art equity alpha factors for quantitative hedge funds. I propose to generalize RUC into a model agnostic feature optimization framework…
Given an incomplete ratings data over a set of users and items, the preference completion problem aims to estimate a personalized total preference order over a subset of the items. In practical settings, a ranked list of top-$k$ items from…
Recommender systems are critical for delivering personalized content across digital platforms, and recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities to enhance them with richer world knowledge and explicit reasoning…
DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) has become a widely used offline preference optimization algorithm due to its simplicity and training stability. However, DPO is prone to overfitting and collapse. To address these challenges, we propose…
An efficient decoding algorithm for horizontally u-interleaved LRPC codes is proposed and analyzed. Upper bounds on the decoding failure rate and the computational complexity of the algorithm are derived. It is shown that interleaving…
Due to the high computational demands executing a rigorous comparison between hyperparameter optimization (HPO) methods is often cumbersome. The goal of this paper is to facilitate a better empirical evaluation of HPO methods by providing…
The area under the ROC curve (AUC) is the standard measure of a biomarker's discriminatory accuracy; however, naive AUC estimates can be misleading when validation cohorts differ from the intended target population. Such covariate shifts…
Robust PCA is a widely used statistical procedure to recover a underlying low-rank matrix with grossly corrupted observations. This work considers the problem of robust PCA as a nonconvex optimization problem on the manifold of low-rank…