Related papers: Rank-Induced PL Mirror Descent: A Rank-Faithful Se…

Recent work has proposed stochastic Plackett-Luce (PL) ranking models as a robust choice for optimizing relevance and fairness metrics. Unlike their deterministic counterparts that require heuristic optimization algorithms, PL models are…

Rule-induction models have demonstrated great power in the inductive setting of knowledge graph completion. In this setting, the models are tested on a knowledge graph entirely composed of unseen entities. These models learn relation…

Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) is an efficient and effective least-square-based learning algorithm for classification, regression problems based on single hidden layer feed-forward neural network (SLFN). It has been shown in the literature…

Policy mirror descent (PMD) provides a principled framework for reinforcement learning (RL) by iteratively solving KL-regularized policy improvement subproblems. While this approach has been adopted in training advanced LLMs such as Kimi…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), encounter the challenge of distribution shift. Current approaches typically address this issue…

The forward order assumption postulates that the ranking process of the items is carried out by sequentially assigning the positions from the top (most-liked) to the bottom (least-liked) alternative. This assumption has been recently…

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), regularization has emerged as a popular tool both in theory and practice, typically based either on an entropy bonus or a Kullback-Leibler divergence that constrains successive policies. In practice, these…

Multistage ranking models, including the popular Plackett-Luce distribution (PL), rely on the assumption that the ranking process is performed sequentially, by assigning the positions from the top to the bottom one (forward order). A recent…

Choice behavior and preferences typically involve numerous and subjective aspects that are difficult to be identified and quantified. For this reason, their exploration is frequently conducted through the collection of ordinal evidence in…

This paper is concerned with multi-agent optimization problem. A distributed randomized gradient-free mirror descent (DRGFMD) method is developed by introducing a randomized gradient-free oracle in the mirror descent scheme where the…

Online learning algorithms are fast, memory-efficient, easy to implement, and applicable to many prediction problems, including classification, regression, and ranking. Several online algorithms were proposed in the past few decades, some…

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) has emerged as a unifying framework in reinforcement learning (RL) by linking policy gradient methods with a first-order optimization method known as mirror descent. At its core, PMD incorporates two key…

Bayesian methods are appealing in their flexibility in modeling complex data and ability in capturing uncertainty in parameters. However, when Bayes' rule does not result in tractable closed-form, most approximate inference algorithms lack…

We consider the optimization problem of minimizing an objective functional, which admits a variational form and is defined over probability distributions on the constrained domain, which poses challenges to both theoretical analysis and…

Recently, adversarial imitation learning has shown a scalable reward acquisition method for inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problems. However, estimated reward signals often become uncertain and fail to train a reliable statistical…

Mirror descent is an elegant optimization technique that leverages a dual space of parametric models to perform gradient descent. While originally developed for convex optimization, it has increasingly been applied in the field of machine…

We study the problem of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) with an average-reward criterion. The goal is to recover an unknown policy and a reward function when the agent only has samples of states and actions from an experienced agent.…

The Expectation--Maximization Maximum Likelihood (EMML) algorithm belongs to the Expectation--Maximization family and is widely used for image reconstruction problems under Poisson noise.In this paper, we reinterpret EMML as a mirror…

This paper studies the problem of inferring a global preference based on the partial rankings provided by many users over different subsets of items according to the Plackett-Luce model. A question of particular interest is how to optimally…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in document re-ranking, a key component in modern Information Retrieval (IR) systems. However, existing LLM-based approaches face notable limitations, including ranking…