Related papers: Talos: Optimizing Top-$K$ Accuracy in Recommender …

In task-oriented dialogs (TOD), reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms train a model to directly optimize response for task-related metrics. However, RL needs to perform exploration, which can be time-consuming due to the slow…

Given an incomplete ratings data over a set of users and items, the preference completion problem aims to estimate a personalized total preference order over a subset of the items. In practical settings, a ranked list of top-$k$ items from…

There exist situations of decision-making under information overload in the Internet, where people have an overwhelming number of available options to choose from, e.g. products to buy in an e-commerce site, or restaurants to visit in a…

Cascade ranking is a widely adopted paradigm in large-scale information retrieval systems for Top-K item selection. However, the Top-K operator is non-differentiable, hindering end-to-end training. Existing methods include Learning-to-Rank…

We formulate selecting the best optimizing system (SBOS) problems and provide solutions for those problems. In an SBOS problem, a finite number of systems are contenders. Inside each system, a continuous decision variable affects the…

Many complex multi-target prediction problems that concern large target spaces are characterised by a need for efficient prediction strategies that avoid the computation of predictions for all targets explicitly. Examples of such problems…

Test-Time Scaling (TTS) improves the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by using additional inference-time computation to explore multiple reasoning paths through search. Yet how to allocate a fixed rollout budget most effectively…

Task arithmetic has emerged as a promising approach for editing models by representing task-specific knowledge as composable task vectors. However, existing methods rely on network linearization to derive task vectors, leading to…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) enhances LLM reasoning, yet a paradox emerges as models scale: strong base models saturate standard benchmarks (e.g., MATH), yielding correct but homogeneous solutions. In such environments, the lack of failure…

Selecting a small set of representatives from a large database is important in many applications such as multi-criteria decision making, web search, and recommendation. The $k$-regret minimizing set ($k$-RMS) problem was recently proposed…

Document summarisation can be formulated as a sequential decision-making problem, which can be solved by Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. The predominant RL paradigm for summarisation learns a cross-input policy, which requires…

Robust topology optimization (RTO), as a class of topology optimization problems, identifies a design with the best average performance while reducing the response sensitivity to input uncertainties, e.g. load uncertainty. Solving RTO is…

Albeit, the implicit feedback based recommendation problem - when only the user history is available but there are no ratings - is the most typical setting in real-world applications, it is much less researched than the explicit feedback…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate robust capabilities across various fields, leading to a paradigm shift in LLM-enhanced Recommender System (RS). Research to date focuses on point-wise and pair-wise recommendation paradigms, which…

Top-N recommendation aims to recommend each consumer a small set of N items from a large collection of items, and its accuracy is one of the most common indexes to evaluate the performance of a recommendation system. While a large number of…

Sequential Recommender Systems (SRSs) are widely employed to model user behavior over time. However, their robustness in the face of perturbations in training data remains a largely understudied yet critical issue. A fundamental challenge…

The textile and apparel industries have grown tremendously over the last few years. Customers no longer have to visit many stores, stand in long queues, or try on garments in dressing rooms as millions of products are now available in…

The pre-ranking stage in industrial recommendation systems faces a fundamental conflict between efficiency and effectiveness. While powerful models like Target Attention (TA) excel at capturing complex feature interactions in the ranking…

Finetuning foundation models for specific tasks is an emerging paradigm in modern machine learning. The efficacy of task-specific finetuning largely depends on the selection of appropriate training data. We present TSDS (Task-Specific Data…

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims at learning related tasks in a unified model to achieve mutual improvement among tasks considering their shared knowledge. It is an important topic in recommendation due to the demand for multi-task prediction…