Related papers: Counterfactual Risk Minimization with IPS-Weighted…

Prediction-Powered Inference (PPI) is a recently proposed statistical inference technique for parameter estimation that leverages pseudo-labels on both labeled and unlabeled data to construct an unbiased, low-variance estimator. In this…

Creating labeled training sets has become one of the major roadblocks in machine learning. To address this, recent \emph{Weak Supervision (WS)} frameworks synthesize training labels from multiple potentially noisy supervision sources.…

Ranking items regarding individual user interests is a core technique of multiple downstream tasks such as recommender systems. Learning such a personalized ranker typically relies on the implicit feedback from users' past click-through…

In counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR) user interactions are used as a source of supervision. Since user interactions come with bias, an important focus of research in this field lies in developing methods to correct for the bias of…

We introduce a novel Pseudo-Negative Regularization (PNR) framework for effective continual self-supervised learning (CSSL). Our PNR leverages pseudo-negatives obtained through model-based augmentation in a way that newly learned…

Learning-to-Rank (LTR) models trained from implicit feedback (e.g. clicks) suffer from inherent biases. A well-known one is the position bias -- documents in top positions are more likely to receive clicks due in part to their position…

How to sample high quality negative instances from unlabeled data, i.e., negative sampling, is important for training implicit collaborative filtering and contrastive learning models. Although previous studies have proposed some approaches…

Nonprobability samples have rapidly emerged to address time-sensitive priority topics in a variety of fields. While these data are timely, they are prone to selection bias. To mitigate selection bias, a large number of survey research…

Inverse weighting with an estimated propensity score is widely used by estimation methods in causal inference to adjust for confounding bias. However, directly inverting propensity score estimates can lead to instability, bias, and…

In this paper we introduce the first application of the Belief Propagation (BP) algorithm in the design of recommender systems. We formulate the recommendation problem as an inference problem and aim to compute the marginal probability…

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…

Recommendation models trained on the user feedback collected from deployed recommendation systems are commonly biased. User feedback is considerably affected by the exposure mechanism, as users only provide feedback on the items exposed to…

The learning objective is integral to collaborative filtering systems, where the Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) loss is widely used for learning informative backbones. However, BPR often experiences slow convergence and suboptimal…

Importance sampling (IS) is a common reweighting strategy for off-policy prediction in reinforcement learning. While it is consistent and unbiased, it can result in high variance updates to the weights for the value function. In this work,…

Recently, there is an emerging interest in adversarially training a classifier with a rejection option (also known as a selective classifier) for boosting adversarial robustness. While rejection can incur a cost in many applications,…

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) may suffer from limited scope. In particular, samples may be unrepresentative: some RCTs over- or under- sample individuals with certain characteristics compared to the target population, for which one…

Importance sampling (IS) represents a fundamental technique for a large surge of off-policy reinforcement learning approaches. Policy gradient (PG) methods, in particular, significantly benefit from IS, enabling the effective reuse of…

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) have shown great success in accurately capturing a user's current and detailed preference through the multi-round interaction cycle while effectively guiding users to a more personalized…

Pairwise learning strategies are prevalent for optimizing recommendation models on implicit feedback data, which usually learns user preference by discriminating between positive (i.e., clicked by a user) and negative items (i.e., obtained…

Most implicit collaborative filtering (CF) models are trained with negative sampling, where existing work designs sophisticated strategies for high-quality negatives while largely overlooking the exploration of positive samples. Although…