Related papers: New insights into Elo algorithm for practitioners …
Ranking a vector of alternatives on the basis of a series of paired comparisons is a relevant topic in many instances. A popular example is ranking contestants in sport tournaments. To this purpose, paired comparison models such as the…
DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) has become a widely used offline preference optimization algorithm due to its simplicity and training stability. However, DPO is prone to overfitting and collapse. To address these challenges, we propose…
We develop a decision making framework to cast the problem of learning a ranking policy for search or recommendation engines in a two-sided e-commerce marketplace as an expected reward optimization problem using observational data. As a…
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models rely on balanced expert utilization to fully realize their scalability. However, existing load-balancing methods are largely heuristic and operate on noisy mini-batch assignment statistics, introducing bias…
In high dimension, it is customary to consider Lasso-type estimators to enforce sparsity. For standard Lasso theory to hold, the regularization parameter should be proportional to the noise level, yet the latter is generally unknown in…
Capture-recapture experiments are widely used to estimate the abundance of a finite population. Based on capture-recapture data, the empirical likelihood (EL) method has been shown to outperform the conventional conditional likelihood (CL)…
The success of a football team depends on various individual skills and performances of the selected players as well as how cohesively they perform. We propose a two-stage process for selecting optimal playing eleven of a football team from…
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the aim is to estimate the performance of a new policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy, or policies. In…
Preference alignment is pivotal for empowering large language models (LLMs) to generate helpful and harmless responses. However, the performance of preference alignment is highly sensitive to the prevalent noise in the preference data.…
In this work we use Equal Oppportunity (EO) doctrines from political philosophy to make explicit the normative judgements embedded in different conceptions of algorithmic fairness. We contrast formal EO approaches that narrowly focus on…
Interleaving is an online evaluation approach for information retrieval systems that compares the effectiveness of ranking functions in interpreting the users' implicit feedback. Previous work such as Hofmann et al (2011) has evaluated the…
We present a methodology for probabilistic load forecasting that is based on lasso (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator) estimation. The model considered can be regarded as a bivariate time-varying threshold autoregressive(AR)…
Extreme learning machine (ELM) is a network model that arbitrarily initializes the first hidden layer and can be computed speedily. In order to improve the classification performance of ELM, a $\ell_2$ and $\ell_{0.5}$ regularization ELM…
Assessing and comparing player skill in online multiplayer gaming environments is essential for fair matchmaking and player engagement. Traditional ranking models like Elo and Glicko-2, designed for two-player games, are insufficient for…
We consider the classic problem of establishing a statistical ranking of a set of n items given a set of inconsistent and incomplete pairwise comparisons between such items. Instantiations of this problem occur in numerous applications in…
In this paper, we review state-of-the-art methods for feature selection in statistics with an application-oriented eye. Indeed, sparsity is a valuable property and the profusion of research on the topic might have provided little guidance…
The Lasso is an attractive technique for regularization and variable selection for high-dimensional data, where the number of predictor variables $p_n$ is potentially much larger than the number of samples $n$. However, it was recently…
This paper develops an adaptive observation-based efficient reinforcement learning (RL) approach for systems with uncertain drift dynamics. A novel concurrent learning adaptive extended observer (CL-AEO) is first designed to jointly…
We examine two types of binary betting markets, whose primary goal is for profit (such as sports gambling) or to gain information (such as prediction markets). We articulate the interplay between belief and price-setting to analyse both…
In data-driven stochastic optimization, model parameters of the underlying distribution need to be estimated from data in addition to the optimization task. Recent literature considers integrating the estimation and optimization processes…