Related papers: Exploiting Positional Bias for Query-Agnostic Gene…

Neural ranking models have achieved remarkable progress and are now widely deployed in real-world applications such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, like other neural architectures, they remain vulnerable to adversarial…

Adversarial attacks are a major challenge faced by current machine learning research. These purposely crafted inputs fool even the most advanced models, precluding their deployment in safety-critical applications. Extensive research in…

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…

With widening deployments of natural language processing (NLP) in daily life, inherited social biases from NLP models have become more severe and problematic. Previous studies have shown that word embeddings trained on human-generated…

Transformer-based agentic AI is rapidly being deployed on major platforms to help users shop, watch, and navigate content with less effort. While these systems can deliver impressive performance, a key concern is whether they may be less…

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge from retrieved documents, thereby overcoming the limitations of models' static intrinsic knowledge.…

Adversarial examples pose a significant challenge to deep neural networks (DNNs) across both image and text domains, with the intent to degrade model performance through meticulously altered inputs. Adversarial texts, however, are distinct…

Recommender and search systems commonly rely on Learning To Rank models trained on logged user interactions to order items by predicted relevance. However, such interaction data is often subject to position bias, as users are more likely to…

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success, yet their wide adoption is often hindered by their opaque decision-making. To address this, attribution methods have been proposed to assign relevance values to each part of…

As the heart of a search engine, the ranking system plays a crucial role in satisfying users' information demands. More recently, neural rankers fine-tuned from pre-trained language models (PLMs) establish state-of-the-art ranking…

Pretraining Neural Language Models (NLMs) over a large corpus involves chunking the text into training examples, which are contiguous text segments of sizes processable by the neural architecture. We highlight a bias introduced by this…

Neural ranking models (NRMs) have become one of the most important techniques in information retrieval (IR). Due to the limitation of relevance labels, the training of NRMs heavily relies on negative sampling over unlabeled data. In general…

This study presents a novel model for invertible sentence embeddings using a residual recurrent network trained on an unsupervised encoding task. Rather than the probabilistic outputs common to neural machine translation models, our…

Accurate estimates of examination bias are crucial for unbiased learning-to-rank from implicit feedback in search engines and recommender systems, since they enable the use of Inverse Propensity Score (IPS) weighting techniques to address…

The prevalence and strong capability of large language models (LLMs) present significant safety and ethical risks if exploited by malicious users. To prevent the potentially deceptive usage of LLMs, recent works have proposed algorithms to…

In various real-world applications such as machine translation, sentiment analysis, and question answering, a pivotal role is played by NLP models, facilitating efficient communication and decision-making processes in domains ranging from…

We study semantic collisions: texts that are semantically unrelated but judged as similar by NLP models. We develop gradient-based approaches for generating semantic collisions and demonstrate that state-of-the-art models for many tasks…

Currently, natural language processing (NLP) models are wildly used in various scenarios. However, NLP models, like all deep models, are vulnerable to adversarially generated text. Numerous works have been working on mitigating the…

Streaming services have reshaped how we discover and engage with digital entertainment. Despite these advancements, effectively understanding the wide spectrum of user search queries continues to pose a significant challenge. An accurate…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in information retrieval tasks like passage ranking. Our research examines how instruction-following capabilities in LLMs interact with multi-document comparison tasks,…