297 research outputs found
Efficient Optimization for Rank-based Loss Functions
The accuracy of information retrieval systems is often measured using complex
loss functions such as the average precision (AP) or the normalized discounted
cumulative gain (NDCG). Given a set of positive and negative samples, the
parameters of a retrieval system can be estimated by minimizing these loss
functions. However, the non-differentiability and non-decomposability of these
loss functions does not allow for simple gradient based optimization
algorithms. This issue is generally circumvented by either optimizing a
structured hinge-loss upper bound to the loss function or by using asymptotic
methods like the direct-loss minimization framework. Yet, the high
computational complexity of loss-augmented inference, which is necessary for
both the frameworks, prohibits its use in large training data sets. To
alleviate this deficiency, we present a novel quicksort flavored algorithm for
a large class of non-decomposable loss functions. We provide a complete
characterization of the loss functions that are amenable to our algorithm, and
show that it includes both AP and NDCG based loss functions. Furthermore, we
prove that no comparison based algorithm can improve upon the computational
complexity of our approach asymptotically. We demonstrate the effectiveness of
our approach in the context of optimizing the structured hinge loss upper bound
of AP and NDCG loss for learning models for a variety of vision tasks. We show
that our approach provides significantly better results than simpler
decomposable loss functions, while requiring a comparable training time.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure
Optimizing Ranking Measures for Compact Binary Code Learning
Hashing has proven a valuable tool for large-scale information retrieval.
Despite much success, existing hashing methods optimize over simple objectives
such as the reconstruction error or graph Laplacian related loss functions,
instead of the performance evaluation criteria of interest---multivariate
performance measures such as the AUC and NDCG. Here we present a general
framework (termed StructHash) that allows one to directly optimize multivariate
performance measures. The resulting optimization problem can involve
exponentially or infinitely many variables and constraints, which is more
challenging than standard structured output learning. To solve the StructHash
optimization problem, we use a combination of column generation and
cutting-plane techniques. We demonstrate the generality of StructHash by
applying it to ranking prediction and image retrieval, and show that it
outperforms a few state-of-the-art hashing methods.Comment: Appearing in Proc. European Conference on Computer Vision 201
BoostFM: Boosted Factorization Machines for Top-N Feature-based Recommendation
Feature-based matrix factorization techniques such as Factorization Machines (FM) have been proven to achieve impressive accuracy for the rating prediction task. However, most common recommendation scenarios are formulated as a top-N item ranking problem with implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, purchases)rather than explicit ratings. To address this problem, with both implicit feedback and feature information, we propose a feature-based collaborative boosting recommender called BoostFM, which integrates boosting into factorization models during the process of item ranking. Specifically, BoostFM is an adaptive boosting framework that linearly combines multiple homogeneous component recommenders, which are repeatedly constructed on the basis of the individual FM model by a re-weighting scheme. Two ways are proposed to efficiently train the component recommenders from the perspectives of both pairwise and listwise Learning-to-Rank (L2R). The properties of our proposed method are empirically studied on three real-world datasets. The experimental results show that BoostFM outperforms a number of state-of-the-art approaches for top-N recommendation
LambdaOpt: Learn to Regularize Recommender Models in Finer Levels
Recommendation models mainly deal with categorical variables, such as
user/item ID and attributes. Besides the high-cardinality issue, the
interactions among such categorical variables are usually long-tailed, with the
head made up of highly frequent values and a long tail of rare ones. This
phenomenon results in the data sparsity issue, making it essential to
regularize the models to ensure generalization. The common practice is to
employ grid search to manually tune regularization hyperparameters based on the
validation data. However, it requires non-trivial efforts and large computation
resources to search the whole candidate space; even so, it may not lead to the
optimal choice, for which different parameters should have different
regularization strengths. In this paper, we propose a hyperparameter
optimization method, LambdaOpt, which automatically and adaptively enforces
regularization during training. Specifically, it updates the regularization
coefficients based on the performance of validation data. With LambdaOpt, the
notorious tuning of regularization hyperparameters can be avoided; more
importantly, it allows fine-grained regularization (i.e. each parameter can
have an individualized regularization coefficient), leading to better
generalized models. We show how to employ LambdaOpt on matrix factorization, a
classical model that is representative of a large family of recommender models.
Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of
our method in boosting the performance of top-K recommendation.Comment: Accepted by KDD 201
Neural Ranking Models with Weak Supervision
Despite the impressive improvements achieved by unsupervised deep neural
networks in computer vision and NLP tasks, such improvements have not yet been
observed in ranking for information retrieval. The reason may be the complexity
of the ranking problem, as it is not obvious how to learn from queries and
documents when no supervised signal is available. Hence, in this paper, we
propose to train a neural ranking model using weak supervision, where labels
are obtained automatically without human annotators or any external resources
(e.g., click data). To this aim, we use the output of an unsupervised ranking
model, such as BM25, as a weak supervision signal. We further train a set of
simple yet effective ranking models based on feed-forward neural networks. We
study their effectiveness under various learning scenarios (point-wise and
pair-wise models) and using different input representations (i.e., from
encoding query-document pairs into dense/sparse vectors to using word embedding
representation). We train our networks using tens of millions of training
instances and evaluate it on two standard collections: a homogeneous news
collection(Robust) and a heterogeneous large-scale web collection (ClueWeb).
Our experiments indicate that employing proper objective functions and letting
the networks to learn the input representation based on weakly supervised data
leads to impressive performance, with over 13% and 35% MAP improvements over
the BM25 model on the Robust and the ClueWeb collections. Our findings also
suggest that supervised neural ranking models can greatly benefit from
pre-training on large amounts of weakly labeled data that can be easily
obtained from unsupervised IR models.Comment: In proceedings of The 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on
Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR2017
Unbiased Learning to Rank with Unbiased Propensity Estimation
Learning to rank with biased click data is a well-known challenge. A variety
of methods has been explored to debias click data for learning to rank such as
click models, result interleaving and, more recently, the unbiased
learning-to-rank framework based on inverse propensity weighting. Despite their
differences, most existing studies separate the estimation of click bias
(namely the \textit{propensity model}) from the learning of ranking algorithms.
To estimate click propensities, they either conduct online result
randomization, which can negatively affect the user experience, or offline
parameter estimation, which has special requirements for click data and is
optimized for objectives (e.g. click likelihood) that are not directly related
to the ranking performance of the system. In this work, we address those
problems by unifying the learning of propensity models and ranking models. We
find that the problem of estimating a propensity model from click data is a
dual problem of unbiased learning to rank. Based on this observation, we
propose a Dual Learning Algorithm (DLA) that jointly learns an unbiased ranker
and an \textit{unbiased propensity model}. DLA is an automatic unbiased
learning-to-rank framework as it directly learns unbiased ranking models from
biased click data without any preprocessing. It can adapt to the change of bias
distributions and is applicable to online learning. Our empirical experiments
with synthetic and real-world data show that the models trained with DLA
significantly outperformed the unbiased learning-to-rank algorithms based on
result randomization and the models trained with relevance signals extracted by
click models
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