Towards Two-Stage Counterfactual Learning to Rank
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866909982892490752 |
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| author | Gupta, Shashank Liao, Yiming de Rijke, Maarten |
| author_facet | Gupta, Shashank Liao, Yiming de Rijke, Maarten |
| contents | Counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR) aims to learn a ranking policy from user interactions while correcting for the inherent biases in interaction data, such as position bias. Existing CLTR methods assume a single ranking policy that selects top-K ranking from the entire document candidate set. In real-world applications, the candidate document set is on the order of millions, making a single-stage ranking policy impractical. In order to scale to millions of documents, real-world ranking systems are designed in a two-stage fashion, with a candidate generator followed by a ranker. The existing CLTR method for a two-stage offline ranking system only considers the top-1 ranking set-up and only focuses on training the candidate generator, with the ranker fixed. A CLTR method for training both the ranker and candidate generator jointly is missing from the existing literature. In this paper, we propose a two-stage CLTR estimator that considers the interaction between the two stages and estimates the joint value of the two policies offline. In addition, we propose a novel joint optimization method to train the candidate and ranker policies, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a CLTR estimator and learning method for two-stage ranking. Experimental results on a semi-synthetic benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed joint CLTR method over baselines. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_20854 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Towards Two-Stage Counterfactual Learning to Rank Gupta, Shashank Liao, Yiming de Rijke, Maarten Information Retrieval Counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR) aims to learn a ranking policy from user interactions while correcting for the inherent biases in interaction data, such as position bias. Existing CLTR methods assume a single ranking policy that selects top-K ranking from the entire document candidate set. In real-world applications, the candidate document set is on the order of millions, making a single-stage ranking policy impractical. In order to scale to millions of documents, real-world ranking systems are designed in a two-stage fashion, with a candidate generator followed by a ranker. The existing CLTR method for a two-stage offline ranking system only considers the top-1 ranking set-up and only focuses on training the candidate generator, with the ranker fixed. A CLTR method for training both the ranker and candidate generator jointly is missing from the existing literature. In this paper, we propose a two-stage CLTR estimator that considers the interaction between the two stages and estimates the joint value of the two policies offline. In addition, we propose a novel joint optimization method to train the candidate and ranker policies, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a CLTR estimator and learning method for two-stage ranking. Experimental results on a semi-synthetic benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed joint CLTR method over baselines. |
| title | Towards Two-Stage Counterfactual Learning to Rank |
| topic | Information Retrieval |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20854 |