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Related papers: Learning Preference from Observed Rankings

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This paper develops a practical framework for using observational data to audit the consumer surplus effects of AI-driven decisions, specifically in targeted pricing and algorithmic lending. Traditional approaches first estimate demand…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-06 Zeyu Bian , Max Biggs , Ruijiang Gao , Zhengling Qi

Search engines and recommendation systems attempt to continually improve the quality of the experience they afford to their users. Refining the ranker that produces the lists displayed in response to user requests is an important component…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Vishwa Vinay , Manoj Kilaru , David Arbour

Reinforcement learning is a general method for learning in sequential settings, but it can often be difficult to specify a good reward function when the task is complex. In these cases, preference feedback or expert demonstrations can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Jason R Brown , Carl Henrik Ek , Robert D Mullins

Feature selection can facilitate the learning of mixtures of discrete random variables as they arise, e.g. in crowdsourcing tasks. Intuitively, not all workers are equally reliable but, if the less reliable ones could be eliminated, then…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-28 Vincent Zhao , Steven W. Zucker

Rankings derived from pairwise comparisons are central to many economic and computational systems. In the context of large language models (LLMs), rankings are typically constructed from human preference data and presented as leaderboards…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Angel Rodrigo Avelar Menendez , Yufeng Liu , Xiaowu Dai

Sequential recommendation aims at understanding user preference by capturing successive behavior correlations, which are usually represented as the item purchasing sequences based on their past interactions. Existing efforts generally…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Yifang Qin , Wei Ju , Hongjun Wu , Xiao Luo , Ming Zhang

In many applications, human and LLM evaluators use assessments of relevant criteria to create an overall evaluation for an item or individual. For example, in admissions, committees assess candidates on attributes such as test scores, GPA,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Madeline Celi Kitch , Nihar B. Shah

We consider a natural model of online preference aggregation, where sets of preferred items $R_1, R_2, \ldots, R_t$ along with a demand for $k_t$ items in each $R_t$, appear online. Without prior knowledge of $(R_t, k_t)$, the learner…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Dimitris Fotakis , Thanasis Lianeas , Georgios Piliouras , Stratis Skoulakis

Current alignment pipelines presume a single, universal notion of desirable behavior. However, human preferences often diverge across users, contexts, and cultures. As a result, disagreement collapses into the majority signal and minority…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Daniel Halpern , Evi Micha , Ariel D. Procaccia , Itai Shapira

In empirical studies, the data usually don't include all the variables of interest in an economic model. This paper shows the identification of unobserved variables in observations at the population level. When the observables are distinct…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-12-07 Yingyao Hu

Online marketplaces, search engines, and databases employ aggregated social information to rank their content for users. Two ranking heuristics commonly implemented to order the available options are the average review score and item…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2017-06-27 Pantelis P. Analytis , Alexia Delfino , Juliane Kämmer , Mehdi Moussaïd , Thorsten Joachims

This paper jointly addresses the problem of data uncertainty, popularity bias, and exposure bias in session-based recommender systems. We study the symptoms of this bias both in item embeddings and in recommendations. We propose treating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Klaudia Balcer , Piotr Lipinski

We study a pricing setting where each customer is offered a contextualized price based on customer and/or product features. Often only historical sales data are available, so we observe whether a customer purchased a product at the price…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Max Biggs , Ruijiang Gao , Wei Sun

Choice modeling has been a central topic in the study of individual preference or utility across many fields including economics, marketing, operations research, and psychology. While the vast majority of the literature on choice models has…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-22 Zhongze Cai , Hanzhao Wang , Kalyan Talluri , Xiaocheng Li

Rankings are a type of preference elicitation that arise in experiments where assessors arrange items, for example, in decreasing order of utility. Orderings of n items labelled {1,...,n} denoted are permutations that reflect strict…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-20 Luiza S. C. Piancastelli , Nial Friel

We consider sequential or active ranking of a set of n items based on noisy pairwise comparisons. Items are ranked according to the probability that a given item beats a randomly chosen item, and ranking refers to partitioning the items…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-26 Reinhard Heckel , Nihar B. Shah , Kannan Ramchandran , Martin J. Wainwright

Recommendation algorithms typically build models based on historical user-item interactions (e.g., clicks, likes, or ratings) to provide a personalized ranked list of items. These interactions are often distributed unevenly over different…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Ziwei Zhu , Jianling Wang , James Caverlee

Learning to rank is a key component of many e-commerce search engines. In learning to rank, one is interested in optimising the global ordering of a list of items according to their utility for users.Popular approaches learn a scoring…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Przemysław Pobrotyn , Tomasz Bartczak , Mikołaj Synowiec , Radosław Białobrzeski , Jarosław Bojar

Recommending items to users is a challenging task due to the large amount of missing information. In many cases, the data solely consist of ratings or tags voluntarily contributed by each user on a very limited subset of the available…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-10-01 Claire Vernade , Olivier Cappé

Observed associations in a database may be due in whole or part to variations in unrecorded (latent) variables. Identifying such variables and their causal relationships with one another is a principal goal in many scientific and practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-12-12 Ricardo Silva , Richard Scheines , Clark Glymour , Peter L. Spirtes