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Related papers: RewardRank: Optimizing True Learning-to-Rank Utili…

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Online Learning to Rank (OLTR) optimises ranking models using implicit user feedback, such as clicks. Unlike traditional Learning to Rank (LTR) methods that rely on a static set of training data with relevance judgements to learn a ranking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Shuyi Wang

Human-designed reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL) agents are frequently misaligned with the humans' true, unobservable objectives, and thus act only as proxies. Optimizing for a misspecified proxy reward function often induces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , Logan Mondal Bhamidipaty , Emma Brunskill

Evaluating retrieval-ranking systems is crucial for developing high-performing models. While online A/B testing is the gold standard, its high cost and risks to user experience require effective offline methods. However, relying on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Seyedeh Baharan Khatami , Sayan Chakraborty , Ruomeng Xu , Babak Salimi

In today's technology environment, information is abundant, dynamic, and heterogeneous in nature. Automated filtering and prioritization of information is based on the distinction between whether the information adds substantial value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Jade Freeman , Michael Rawson

Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Chaitanya Kharyal , Calarina Muslimani , Matthew E. Taylor

Counterfactual evaluation can estimate Click-Through-Rate (CTR) differences between ranking systems based on historical interaction data, while mitigating the effect of position bias and item-selection bias. We introduce the novel…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-07-29 Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims at learning a good policy from a batch of collected data, without extra interactions with the environment during training. However, current offline RL benchmarks commonly have a large reality gap,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Rongjun Qin , Songyi Gao , Xingyuan Zhang , Zhen Xu , Shengkai Huang , Zewen Li , Weinan Zhang , Yang Yu

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven its efficiency in capturing users' dynamic interests in recent literature. However, training a DRL agent is challenging, because of the sparse environment in recommender systems (RS), DRL…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Lina Yao , Lianyong Qi , Yong Li

Learning to rank systems has become an important aspect of our daily life. However, the implicit user feedback that is used to train many learning to rank models is usually noisy and suffered from user bias (i.e., position bias). Thus,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-08-12 Anh Tran , Tao Yang , Qingyao Ai

Model evolution and constant availability of data are two common phenomena in large-scale real-world machine learning applications, e.g. ads and recommendation systems. To adapt, the real-world system typically retrain with all available…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Jian Zhu , Congcong Liu , Pei Wang , Xiwei Zhao , Zhangang Lin , Jingping Shao

Implicit feedback data, such as user clicks, is commonly used in learning-to-rank (LTR) systems because it is easy to collect and it often reflects user preferences. However, this data is prone to various biases, and training an LTR…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Md Aminul Islam , Kathryn Vasilaky , Elena Zheleva

Although click data is widely used in search systems in practice, so far the inherent bias, most notably position bias, has prevented it from being used in training of a ranker for search, i.e., learning-to-rank. Recently, a number of…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-02-28 Ziniu Hu , Yang Wang , Qu Peng , Hang Li

Offline reinforcement learning has become one of the most practical RL settings. However, most existing works on offline RL focus on the standard setting with scalar reward feedback. It remains unknown how to universally transfer the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Yinglun Xu , David Zhu , Rohan Gumaste , Gagandeep Singh

Personalization is a crucial aspect of many online experiences. In particular, content ranking is often a key component in delivering sophisticated personalization results. Commonly, supervised learning-to-rank methods are applied, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-29 Beyza Ermis , Patrick Ernst , Yannik Stein , Giovanni Zappella

In offline reinforcement learning (RL) agents are trained using a logged dataset. It appears to be the most natural route to attack real-life applications because in domains such as healthcare and robotics interactions with the environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Ksenia Konyushkova , Konrad Zolna , Yusuf Aytar , Alexander Novikov , Scott Reed , Serkan Cabi , Nando de Freitas

In offline reinforcement learning, agents are trained using only a fixed set of stored transitions derived from a source policy. However, this requires that the dataset be labeled by a reward function. In applied settings such as video game…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Alessandro Sestini , Joakim Bergdahl , Konrad Tollmar , Andrew D. Bagdanov , Linus Gisslén

In Online Learning to Rank (OLTR) the aim is to find an optimal ranking model by interacting with users. When learning from user behavior, systems must interact with users while simultaneously learning from those interactions. Unlike other…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2017-11-28 Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Daniel Shin , Daniel S. Brown , Anca D. Dragan

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for recommender systems, enabling effective policy learning by interacting with frozen world models. However, the reward functions in these world models,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Yi Zhang , Ruihong Qiu , Xuwei Xu , Jiajun Liu , Sen Wang

Nowadays, recommender systems already impact almost every facet of peoples lives. To provide personalized high quality recommendation results, conventional systems usually train pointwise rankers to predict the absolute value of objectives…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-12-01 Yi Ren , Hongyan Tang , Siwen Zhu