Inference-time Stochastic Ranking with Risk Control

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Guo, Ruocheng, Ton, Jean-François, Liu, Yang, Li, Hang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Guo, Ruocheng
Ton, Jean-François
Liu, Yang
Li, Hang
author_facet Guo, Ruocheng
Ton, Jean-François
Liu, Yang
Li, Hang
contents Learning to Rank (LTR) methods are vital in online economies, affecting users and item providers. Fairness in LTR models is crucial to allocate exposure proportionally to item relevance. Widely used deterministic LTR models can lead to unfair exposure distribution, especially when items with the same relevance receive slightly different ranking scores. Stochastic LTR models, incorporating the Plackett-Luce (PL) ranking model, address fairness issues but suffer from high training cost. In addition, they cannot provide guarantees on the utility or fairness, which can lead to dramatic degraded utility when optimized for fairness. To overcome these limitations, we propose Inference-time Stochastic Ranking with Risk Control (ISRR), a novel method that performs stochastic ranking at inference time with guanranteed utility or fairness given pretrained scoring functions from deterministic or stochastic LTR models. Comprehensive experimental results on three widely adopted datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves utility and fairness comparable to existing stochastic ranking methods with much lower computational cost. In addition, results verify that our method provides finite-sample guarantee on utility and fairness. This advancement represents a significant contribution to the field of stochastic ranking and fair LTR with promising real-world applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_07188
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Inference-time Stochastic Ranking with Risk Control
Guo, Ruocheng
Ton, Jean-François
Liu, Yang
Li, Hang
Machine Learning
Computers and Society
Information Retrieval
Learning to Rank (LTR) methods are vital in online economies, affecting users and item providers. Fairness in LTR models is crucial to allocate exposure proportionally to item relevance. Widely used deterministic LTR models can lead to unfair exposure distribution, especially when items with the same relevance receive slightly different ranking scores. Stochastic LTR models, incorporating the Plackett-Luce (PL) ranking model, address fairness issues but suffer from high training cost. In addition, they cannot provide guarantees on the utility or fairness, which can lead to dramatic degraded utility when optimized for fairness. To overcome these limitations, we propose Inference-time Stochastic Ranking with Risk Control (ISRR), a novel method that performs stochastic ranking at inference time with guanranteed utility or fairness given pretrained scoring functions from deterministic or stochastic LTR models. Comprehensive experimental results on three widely adopted datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves utility and fairness comparable to existing stochastic ranking methods with much lower computational cost. In addition, results verify that our method provides finite-sample guarantee on utility and fairness. This advancement represents a significant contribution to the field of stochastic ranking and fair LTR with promising real-world applications.
title Inference-time Stochastic Ranking with Risk Control
topic Machine Learning
Computers and Society
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07188