Related papers: Are Optimal Algorithms Still Optimal? Rethinking S…

Efficiently reranking documents retrieved from information retrieval (IR) pipelines to enhance overall quality of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system remains an important yet challenging problem. Recent studies have highlighted the…

Pairwise Ranking Prompting (PRP) elicits pairwise preference judgments from an LLM, which are then aggregated into a ranking, usually via classical sorting algorithms. However, judgments are noisy, order-sensitive, and sometimes…

Deciding which large language model (LLM) to use is a complex challenge. Pairwise ranking has emerged as a new method for evaluating human preferences for LLMs. This approach entails humans evaluating pairs of model outputs based on a…

Ranking documents using Large Language Models (LLMs) by directly feeding the query and candidate documents into the prompt is an interesting and practical problem. However, researchers have found it difficult to outperform fine-tuned…

Large Language Models (LLMs) and other large foundation models have achieved noteworthy success, but their size exacerbates existing resource consumption and latency challenges. In particular, the large-scale deployment of these models is…

Effective caching is crucial for the performance of modern-day computing systems. A key optimization problem arising in caching -- which item to evict to make room for a new item -- cannot be optimally solved without knowing the future.…

Intuitively, an ideal collaborative filtering (CF) model should learn from users' full rankings over all items to make optimal top-K recommendations. Due to the absence of such full rankings in practice, most CF models rely on pairwise loss…

Test-time compute scaling, the practice of spending extra computation during inference via repeated sampling, search, or extended reasoning, has become a powerful lever for improving large language model performance. Yet deploying these…

News recommendation is a challenging task that involves personalization based on the interaction history and preferences of each user. Recent works have leveraged the power of pretrained language models (PLMs) to directly rank news items by…

The linear ordering problem (LOP), which consists in ordering M objects from their pairwise comparisons, is commonly applied in many areas of research. While efforts have been made to devise efficient LOP algorithms, verification of whether…

Traditionally, query optimizers rely on cost models to choose the best execution plan from several candidates, making precise cost estimates critical for efficient query execution. In recent years, cost models based on machine learning have…

Modern retrieval systems do not rely on a single ranking model to construct their rankings. Instead, they generally take a cascading approach where a sequence of ranking models are applied in multiple re-ranking stages. Thereby, they…

Evaluating performance across optimization algorithms on many problems presents a complex challenge due to the diversity of numerical scales involved. Traditional data processing methods, such as hypothesis testing and Bayesian inference,…

Many important multiple-objective decision problems can be cast within the framework of ranking under constraints and solved via a weighted bipartite matching linear program. Some of these optimization problems, such as personalized content…

In this paper we develop optimal algorithms in the binary-forking model for a variety of fundamental problems, including sorting, semisorting, list ranking, tree contraction, range minima, and ordered set union, intersection and difference.…

Rankings are central to decision-making in fields ranging from education to online platforms, yet classical deterministic methods such as the Borda count method or Copeland-type pairwise methods ignore uncertainty due to sampling noise or…

We introduce the problem of ranking with slot constraints, which can be used to model a wide range of application problems -- from college admission with limited slots for different majors, to composing a stratified cohort of eligible…

The powerful generative abilities of large language models (LLMs) show potential in generating relevance labels for search applications. Previous work has found that directly asking about relevancy, such as ``How relevant is document A to…

We formalize a new paradigm for optimality of algorithms, that generalizes worst-case optimality based only on input-size to problem-dependent parameters including implicit ones. We re-visit some existing sorting algorithms from this…

During the last decade, sampling-based path planning algorithms, such as Probabilistic RoadMaps (PRM) and Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT), have been shown to work well in practice and possess theoretical guarantees such as…