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E-commerce search systems rely on modeling user behavior to estimate item relevance and user preference, which are typically assumed to be stable and independently learnable signals. However, in practice, user interactions are jointly…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Haoqian Zhang , Ziyuan Yang , Yi Zhang

When tracking user-specific online activities, each user's preference is revealed in the form of choices and comparisons. For example, a user's purchase history is a record of her choices, i.e. which item was chosen among a subset of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-01 Sahand Negahban , Sewoong Oh , Kiran K. Thekumparampil , Jiaming Xu

Ensuring AI models align with human values is essential for their safety and functionality. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) leverages human preferences to achieve this alignment. However, when preferences are sourced from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Ryan Bahlous-Boldi , Li Ding , Lee Spector , Scott Niekum

We consider Bayesian optimization of expensive-to-evaluate experiments that generate vector-valued outcomes over which a decision-maker (DM) has preferences. These preferences are encoded by a utility function that is not known in closed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-23 Zhiyuan Jerry Lin , Raul Astudillo , Peter I. Frazier , Eytan Bakshy

Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides an effective way to overcome the challenges of designing reward and the high costs of online interaction. However, since labeling preference needs real-time human feedback,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Xiao-Yin Liu , Guotao Li , Xiao-Hu Zhou , Zeng-Guang Hou

Personalization despite being an effective solution to the problem information overload remains tricky on account of multiple dimensions to consider. Furthermore, the challenge of avoiding overdoing personalization involves estimation of a…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2017-11-09 Arjumand Younus , Muhammad Atif Qureshi

We consider the problem of learning the preferences of a heterogeneous population by observing choices from an assortment of products, ads, or other offerings. Our observation model takes a form common in assortment planning applications:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-09 Nathan Kallus , Madeleine Udell

Academic research in the field of recommender systems mainly focuses on the problem of maximizing the users' utility by trying to identify the most relevant items for each user. However, such items are not necessarily the ones that maximize…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2017-07-26 Dietmar Jannach , Gediminas Adomavicius

Large Language Models show great potential with external tools, but face significant challenges in complex, multi-turn tool invocation. They often exhibit weak planning, tool hallucination, erroneous parameter generation, and struggle with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Qihao Wang , Mingzhe Lu , Jiayue Wu , Yue Hu , Yanbing Liu

We study a demand response problem from utility (also referred to as operator)'s perspective with realistic settings, in which the utility faces uncertainty and limited communication. Specifically, the utility does not know the cost…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-08-11 Pan Li , Hao Wang , Baosen Zhang

Income- and price-elasticity of demand quantify the responsiveness of markets to changes in income, and in prices, respectively. Under the assumptions of utility maximization and preference-independence (additive preferences), mathematical…

Applications · Statistics 2016-04-27 Lorenzo Sabatelli

Consumers discover their preferences through experience, yet the sequence and composition of those experiences are often designed by firms, digital platforms, or policymakers. We introduce a ``data-design'' framework for preference…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-17 Sebastiano Della Lena , Alessio Muscillo , Paolo Pin

This paper introduces a novel stochastic control framework to enhance the capabilities of automated investment managers, or robo-advisors, by accurately inferring clients' investment preferences from past activities. Our approach leverages…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-05 Haoyang Cao , Zhengqi Wu , Renyuan Xu

This survey reviews recent developments in revealed preference theory. It discusses the testable implications of theories of choice that are germane to specific economic environments. The focus is on expected utility in risky environments;…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2019-12-04 Federico Echenique

Unbiased learning to rank (ULTR), which aims to learn unbiased ranking models from biased user behavior logs, plays an important role in Web search. Previous research on ULTR has studied a variety of biases in users' clicks, such as…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Zechun Niu , Lang Mei , Liu Yang , Ziyuan Zhao , Qiang Yan , Jiaxin Mao , Ji-Rong Wen

Optimizing multiple objectives simultaneously is an important task for recommendation platforms to improve their performance. However, this task is particularly challenging since the relationships between different objectives are…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Pan Li , Alexander Tuzhilin

We propose a new efficient online algorithm to learn the parameters governing the purchasing behavior of a utility maximizing buyer, who responds to prices, in a repeated interaction setting. The key feature of our algorithm is that it can…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-07 Debjyoti Saharoy , Theja Tulabandhula

We study the problem of online learning (OL) from revealed preferences: a learner wishes to learn a non-strategic agent's private utility function through observing the agent's utility-maximizing actions in a changing environment. We adopt…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-07 Violet Xinying Chen , Fatma Kılınç-Karzan

The increasing reliance on human preference feedback to judge AI-generated pseudo labels has created a pressing need for principled, budget-conscious data acquisition strategies. We address the crucial question of how to optimally allocate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-13 Zihan Dong , Xiaotian Hou , Ruijia Wu , Linjun Zhang

We propose a tensor-based model that fuses a more granular representation of user preferences with the ability to take additional side information into account. The model relies on the concept of ordinal nature of utility, which better…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2018-07-30 Evgeny Frolov , Ivan Oseledets