Related papers: Uncertainty Quantification for Ranking with Hetero…
We revisit the problem of inferring the overall ranking among entities in the framework of Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model, based on available empirical data on pairwise preferences. By a simple transformation, we can cast the problem as…
Large foundation models pretrained on raw web-scale data are not readily deployable without additional step of extensive alignment to human preferences. Such alignment is typically done by collecting large amounts of pairwise comparisons…
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…
Ranking or assessing centrality in multivariate and non-Euclidean data is difficult because there is no canonical order and many depth notions become computationally fragile in high-dimensional or structured settings. We introduce a…
The question of aggregating pair-wise comparisons to obtain a global ranking over a collection of objects has been of interest for a very long time: be it ranking of online gamers (e.g. MSR's TrueSkill system) and chess players, aggregating…
We study estimation and statistical inference for reward models used in aligning large language models (LLMs). A key component of LLM alignment is reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where humans compare pairs of…
This paper considers ranking inference of $n$ items based on the observed data on the top choice among $M$ randomly selected items at each trial. This is a useful modification of the Plackett-Luce model for $M$-way ranking with only the top…
We consider the problem of ranking a set of items from pairwise comparisons in the presence of features associated with the items. Recent works have established that $O(n\log(n))$ samples are needed to rank well when there is no feature…
Learning the preferences of a human improves the quality of the interaction with the human. The number of queries available to learn preferences maybe limited especially when interacting with a human, and so active learning is a must. One…
Ranking and comparing items is crucial for collecting information about preferences in many areas, from marketing to politics. The Mallows rank model is among the most successful approaches to analyse rank data, but its computational…
Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model estimation is a well-established strategy to rank a collection of items given a dataset of pairwise comparisons. Although the theoretical performance of BTL estimation methods, such as spectral and maximum…
We propose a novel and efficient algorithm for the collaborative preference completion problem, which involves jointly estimating individualized rankings for a set of entities over a shared set of items, based on a limited number of…
Preference-based data often appear complex and noisy but may conceal underlying homogeneous structures. This paper introduces a novel framework of ranking structure recognition for preference-based data. We first develop an approach to…
Conventional Learning-to-Rank (LTR) methods optimize the utility of the rankings to the users, but they are oblivious to their impact on the ranked items. However, there has been a growing understanding that the latter is important to…
Ranking items based on pairwise comparisons is common, from using match outcomes to rank sports teams to using purchase or survey data to rank consumer products. Statistical inference-based methods such as the Bradley-Terry model, which…
Learning the optimal ordering of content is an important challenge in website design. The learning to rank (LTR) framework models this problem as a sequential problem of selecting lists of content and observing where users decide to click.…
Existing observational approaches for learning human preferences, such as inverse reinforcement learning, usually make strong assumptions about the observability of the human's environment. However, in reality, people make many important…
We investigate the Plackett-Luce (PL) model based listwise learning-to-rank (LTR) on data with partitioned preference, where a set of items are sliced into ordered and disjoint partitions, but the ranking of items within a partition is…
Implicit bias is the unconscious attribution of particular qualities (or lack thereof) to a member from a particular social group (e.g., defined by gender or race). Studies on implicit bias have shown that these unconscious stereotypes can…
Pairwise human-preference platforms such as Chatbot Arena have become central to large language model (LLM) evaluation, yet reliable task-specific ranking remains challenging. Global leaderboards mask task heterogeneity, while ranking each…