In online ranking, a learning algorithm sequentially ranks a set of items and receives feedback on its ranking in the form of relevance scores. Since obtaining relevance scores typically involves human annotation, it is of great interest to consider a partial feedback setting where feedback is restricted to the top-$k$ items in the rankings. Chaudhuri and Tewari [2017] developed a framework to analyze online ranking algorithms with top $k$ feedback. A key element in their work was the use of techniques from partial monitoring. In this paper, we further investigate online ranking with top $k$ feedback and solve some open problems posed by Chaudhuri and Tewari [2017]. We provide a full characterization of minimax regret rates with the top $k$ feedback model for all $k$ and for the following ranking performance measures: Pairwise Loss, Discounted Cumulative Gain, and Precision@n. In addition, we give an efficient algorithm that achieves the minimax regret rate for Precision@n.
Learning-to-rank is an applied domain of supervised machine learning. As feature selection has been found to be effective for improving the accuracy of learning models in general, it is intriguing to investigate this process for learning-to-rank domain. In this study, we investigate the use of a popular meta-heuristic approach called simulated annealing for this task. Under the general framework of simulated annealing, we explore various neighborhood selection strategies and temperature cooling schemes. We further introduce a new hyper-parameter called the progress parameter that can effectively be used to traverse the search space. Our algorithms are evaluated on five publicly benchmark datasets of learning-to-rank. For a better validation, we also compare the simulated annealing-based feature selection algorithm with another effective meta-heuristic algorithm, namely local beam search. Extensive experimental results shows the efficacy of our proposed models.
This work presents an algorithm for tracking the shape of multiple entangling Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs) from a sequence of RGB-D images. This algorithm runs in real-time and improves on previous single-DLO tracking approaches by enabling tracking of multiple objects. This is achieved using Global-Local Topology Preservation (GLTP). This work uses the geodesic distance in GLTP to define the distance between separate objects and the distance between different parts of the same object. Tracking multiple entangling DLOs is demonstrated experimentally. The source code is publicly released.
Clinically deployed segmentation models are known to fail on data outside of their training distribution. As these models perform well on most cases, it is imperative to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) images at inference to protect against automation bias. This work applies the Mahalanobis distance post hoc to the bottleneck features of a Swin UNETR model that segments the liver on T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging. By reducing the dimensions of the bottleneck features with principal component analysis, OOD images were detected with high performance and minimal computational load.
Many information access systems operationalize their results in terms of rankings, which are then displayed to users in various ranking layouts such as linear lists or grids. User interaction with a retrieved item is highly dependent on the item's position in the layout, and users do not provide similar attention to every position in ranking (under any layout model). User attention is an important component in the evaluation process of ranking, due to its use in effectiveness metrics that estimate utility as well as fairness metrics that evaluate ranking based on social and ethical concerns. These metrics take user browsing behavior into account in their measurement strategies to estimate the attention the user is likely to provide to each item in ranking. Research on understanding user browsing behavior has proposed several user browsing models, and further observed that user browsing behavior differs with different ranking layouts. However, the underlying concepts of these browsing models are often similar, including varying components and parameter settings. We seek to leverage that similarity to represent multiple browsing models in a generalized, configurable framework which can be further extended to more complex ranking scenarios. In this paper, we describe a probabilistic user browsing model for linear rankings, show how they can be configured to yield models commonly used in current evaluation practice, and generalize this model to also account for browsing behaviors in grid-based layouts. This model provides configurable framework for estimating the attention that results from user browsing activity for a range of IR evaluation and measurement applications in multiple formats, and also identifies parameters that need to be estimated through user studies to provide realistic evaluation beyond ranked lists.
Strassen's asymptotic rank conjecture [Progr. Math. 120 (1994)] claims a strong submultiplicative upper bound on the rank of a three-tensor obtained as an iterated Kronecker product of a constant-size base tensor. The conjecture, if true, most notably would put square matrix multiplication in quadratic time. We note here that some more-or-less unexpected algorithmic results in the area of exponential-time algorithms would also follow. Specifically, we study the so-called set cover conjecture, which states that for any $\epsilon>0$ there exists a positive integer constant $k$ such that no algorithm solves the $k$-Set Cover problem in worst-case time $\mathcal{O}((2-\epsilon)^n|\mathcal F|\operatorname{poly}(n))$. The $k$-Set Cover problem asks, given as input an $n$-element universe $U$, a family $\mathcal F$ of size-at-most-$k$ subsets of $U$, and a positive integer $t$, whether there is a subfamily of at most $t$ sets in $\mathcal F$ whose union is $U$. The conjecture was formulated by Cygan et al. in the monograph Parameterized Algorithms [Springer, 2015] but was implicit as a hypothesis already in Cygan et al. [CCC 2012, ACM Trans. Algorithms 2016], there conjectured to follow from the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis. We prove that if the asymptotic rank conjecture is true, then the set cover conjecture is false. Using a reduction by Krauthgamer and Trabelsi [STACS 2019], in this scenario we would also get a $\mathcal{O}((2-\delta)^n)$-time randomized algorithm for some constant $\delta>0$ for another well-studied problem for which no such algorithm is known, namely that of deciding whether a given $n$-vertex directed graph has a Hamiltonian cycle.
Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms have shown strong results in games, robotics, and other real-world applications. Overestimation bias is a known threat to those algorithms and can lead to dramatic performance decreases or even complete algorithmic failure. We frame the bias problem statistically and consider it an instance of estimating the maximum expected value (MEV) of a set of random variables. We propose the $T$-Estimator (TE) based on two-sample testing for the mean, that flexibly interpolates between over- and underestimation by adjusting the significance level of the underlying hypothesis tests. A generalization, termed $K$-Estimator (KE), obeys the same bias and variance bounds as the TE while relying on a nearly arbitrary kernel function. We introduce modifications of $Q$-Learning and the Bootstrapped Deep $Q$-Network (BDQN) using the TE and the KE, and prove convergence in the tabular setting. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive variant of the TE-based BDQN that dynamically adjusts the significance level to minimize the absolute estimation bias. All proposed estimators and algorithms are thoroughly tested and validated on diverse tasks and environments, illustrating the bias control and performance potential of the TE and KE.
Multi-stage ranking pipelines have been a practical solution in modern search systems, where the first-stage retrieval is to return a subset of candidate documents, and latter stages attempt to re-rank those candidates. Unlike re-ranking stages going through quick technique shifts during past decades, the first-stage retrieval has long been dominated by classical term-based models. Unfortunately, these models suffer from the vocabulary mismatch problem, which may block re-ranking stages from relevant documents at the very beginning. Therefore, it has been a long-term desire to build semantic models for the first-stage retrieval that can achieve high recall efficiently. Recently, we have witnessed an explosive growth of research interests on the first-stage semantic retrieval models. We believe it is the right time to survey current status, learn from existing methods, and gain some insights for future development. In this paper, we describe the current landscape of the first-stage retrieval models under a unified framework to clarify the connection between classical term-based retrieval methods, early semantic retrieval methods and neural semantic retrieval methods. Moreover, we identify some open challenges and envision some future directions, with the hope of inspiring more researches on these important yet less investigated topics.
The rapid recent progress in machine learning (ML) has raised a number of scientific questions that challenge the longstanding dogma of the field. One of the most important riddles is the good empirical generalization of overparameterized models. Overparameterized models are excessively complex with respect to the size of the training dataset, which results in them perfectly fitting (i.e., interpolating) the training data, which is usually noisy. Such interpolation of noisy data is traditionally associated with detrimental overfitting, and yet a wide range of interpolating models -- from simple linear models to deep neural networks -- have recently been observed to generalize extremely well on fresh test data. Indeed, the recently discovered double descent phenomenon has revealed that highly overparameterized models often improve over the best underparameterized model in test performance. Understanding learning in this overparameterized regime requires new theory and foundational empirical studies, even for the simplest case of the linear model. The underpinnings of this understanding have been laid in very recent analyses of overparameterized linear regression and related statistical learning tasks, which resulted in precise analytic characterizations of double descent. This paper provides a succinct overview of this emerging theory of overparameterized ML (henceforth abbreviated as TOPML) that explains these recent findings through a statistical signal processing perspective. We emphasize the unique aspects that define the TOPML research area as a subfield of modern ML theory and outline interesting open questions that remain.
The goal of text ranking is to generate an ordered list of texts retrieved from a corpus in response to a query. Although the most common formulation of text ranking is search, instances of the task can also be found in many natural language processing applications. This survey provides an overview of text ranking with neural network architectures known as transformers, of which BERT is the best-known example. The combination of transformers and self-supervised pretraining has, without exaggeration, revolutionized the fields of natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR), and beyond. In this survey, we provide a synthesis of existing work as a single point of entry for practitioners who wish to gain a better understanding of how to apply transformers to text ranking problems and researchers who wish to pursue work in this area. We cover a wide range of modern techniques, grouped into two high-level categories: transformer models that perform reranking in multi-stage ranking architectures and learned dense representations that attempt to perform ranking directly. There are two themes that pervade our survey: techniques for handling long documents, beyond the typical sentence-by-sentence processing approaches used in NLP, and techniques for addressing the tradeoff between effectiveness (result quality) and efficiency (query latency). Although transformer architectures and pretraining techniques are recent innovations, many aspects of how they are applied to text ranking are relatively well understood and represent mature techniques. However, there remain many open research questions, and thus in addition to laying out the foundations of pretrained transformers for text ranking, this survey also attempts to prognosticate where the field is heading.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.