We consider the problem of online learning in misspecified linear stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. Regret guarantees for state-of-the-art linear bandit algorithms such as Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty Linear bandit (OFUL) hold under the assumption that the arms expected rewards are perfectly linear in their features. It is, however, of interest to investigate the impact of potential misspecification in linear bandit models, where the expected rewards are perturbed away from the linear subspace determined by the arms features. Although OFUL has recently been shown to be robust to relatively small deviations from linearity, we show that any linear bandit algorithm that enjoys optimal regret performance in the perfectly linear setting (e.g., OFUL) must suffer linear regret under a sparse additive perturbation of the linear model. In an attempt to overcome this negative result, we define a natural class of bandit models characterized by a non-sparse deviation from linearity. We argue that the OFUL algorithm can fail to achieve sublinear regret even under models that have non-sparse deviation.We finally develop a novel bandit algorithm, comprising a hypothesis test for linearity followed by a decision to use either the OFUL or Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm. For perfectly linear bandit models, the algorithm provably exhibits OFULs favorable regret performance, while for misspecified models satisfying the non-sparse deviation property, the algorithm avoids the linear regret phenomenon and falls back on UCBs sublinear regret scaling. Numerical experiments on synthetic data, and on recommendation data from the public Yahoo! Learning to Rank Challenge dataset, empirically support our findings.
Distinguishing subtle differences in attributes is valuable, yet learning to make visual comparisons remains non-trivial. Not only is the number of possible comparisons quadratic in the number of training images, but also access to images adequately spanning the space of fine-grained visual differences is limited. We propose to overcome the sparsity of supervision problem via synthetically generated images. Building on a state-of-the-art image generation engine, we sample pairs of training images exhibiting slight modifications of individual attributes. Augmenting real training image pairs with these examples, we then train attribute ranking models to predict the relative strength of an attribute in novel pairs of real images. Our results on datasets of faces and fashion images show the great promise of bootstrapping imperfect image generators to counteract sample sparsity for learning to rank.
Most existing approaches to training object detectors rely on fully supervised learning, which requires the tedious manual annotation of object location in a training set. Recently there has been an increasing interest in developing weakly supervised approach to detector training where the object location is not manually annotated but automatically determined based on binary (weak) labels indicating if a training image contains the object. This is a challenging problem because each image can contain many candidate object locations which partially overlaps the object of interest. Existing approaches focus on how to best utilise the binary labels for object location annotation. In this paper we propose to solve this problem from a very different perspective by casting it as a transfer learning problem. Specifically, we formulate a novel transfer learning based on learning to rank, which effectively transfers a model for automatic annotation of object location from an auxiliary dataset to a target dataset with completely unrelated object categories. We show that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art weakly supervised approach to annotating objects in the challenging VOC dataset.
The last decade has seen a revolution in the theory and application of machine learning and pattern recognition. Through these advancements, variable ranking has emerged as an active and growing research area and it is now beginning to be applied to many new problems. The rationale behind this fact is that many pattern recognition problems are by nature ranking problems. The main objective of a ranking algorithm is to sort objects according to some criteria, so that, the most relevant items will appear early in the produced result list. Ranking methods can be analyzed from two different methodological perspectives: ranking to learn and learning to rank. The former aims at studying methods and techniques to sort objects for improving the accuracy of a machine learning model. Enhancing a model performance can be challenging at times. For example, in pattern classification tasks, different data representations can complicate and hide the different explanatory factors of variation behind the data. In particular, hand-crafted features contain many cues that are either redundant or irrelevant, which turn out to reduce the overall accuracy of the classifier. In such a case feature selection is used, that, by producing ranked lists of features, helps to filter out the unwanted information. Moreover, in real-time systems (e.g., visual trackers) ranking approaches are used as optimization procedures which improve the robustness of the system that deals with the high variability of the image streams that change over time. The other way around, learning to rank is necessary in the construction of ranking models for information retrieval, biometric authentication, re-identification, and recommender systems. In this context, the ranking model's purpose is to sort objects according to their degrees of relevance, importance, or preference as defined in the specific application.
Learning to rank has recently emerged as an attractive technique to train deep convolutional neural networks for various computer vision tasks. Pairwise ranking, in particular, has been successful in multi-label image classification, achieving state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks. However, most existing approaches use the hinge loss to train their models, which is non-smooth and thus is difficult to optimize especially with deep networks. Furthermore, they employ simple heuristics, such as top-k or thresholding, to determine which labels to include in the output from a ranked list of labels, which limits their use in the real-world setting. In this work, we propose two techniques to improve pairwise ranking based multi-label image classification: (1) we propose a novel loss function for pairwise ranking, which is smooth everywhere and thus is easier to optimize; and (2) we incorporate a label decision module into the model, estimating the optimal confidence thresholds for each visual concept. We provide theoretical analyses of our loss function in the Bayes consistency and risk minimization framework, and show its benefit over existing pairwise ranking formulations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three large-scale datasets, VOC2007, NUS-WIDE and MS-COCO, achieving the best reported results in the literature.
This paper presents a word-entity duet framework for utilizing knowledge bases in ad-hoc retrieval. In this work, the query and documents are modeled by word-based representations and entity-based representations. Ranking features are generated by the interactions between the two representations, incorporating information from the word space, the entity space, and the cross-space connections through the knowledge graph. To handle the uncertainties from the automatically constructed entity representations, an attention-based ranking model AttR-Duet is developed. With back-propagation from ranking labels, the model learns simultaneously how to demote noisy entities and how to rank documents with the word-entity duet. Evaluation results on TREC Web Track ad-hoc task demonstrate that all of the four-way interactions in the duet are useful, the attention mechanism successfully steers the model away from noisy entities, and together they significantly outperform both word-based and entity-based learning to rank systems.
This paper proposes K-NRM, a kernel based neural model for document ranking. Given a query and a set of documents, K-NRM uses a translation matrix that models word-level similarities via word embeddings, a new kernel-pooling technique that uses kernels to extract multi-level soft match features, and a learning-to-rank layer that combines those features into the final ranking score. The whole model is trained end-to-end. The ranking layer learns desired feature patterns from the pairwise ranking loss. The kernels transfer the feature patterns into soft-match targets at each similarity level and enforce them on the translation matrix. The word embeddings are tuned accordingly so that they can produce the desired soft matches. Experiments on a commercial search engine's query log demonstrate the improvements of K-NRM over prior feature-based and neural-based states-of-the-art, and explain the source of K-NRM's advantage: Its kernel-guided embedding encodes a similarity metric tailored for matching query words to document words, and provides effective multi-level soft matches.
Online learning to rank is a core problem in information retrieval and machine learning. Many provably efficient algorithms have been recently proposed for this problem in specific click models. The click model is a model of how the user interacts with a list of documents. Though these results are significant, their impact on practice is limited, because all proposed algorithms are designed for specific click models and lack convergence guarantees in other models. In this work, we propose BatchRank, the first online learning to rank algorithm for a broad class of click models. The class encompasses two most fundamental click models, the cascade and position-based models. We derive a gap-dependent upper bound on the $T$-step regret of BatchRank and evaluate it on a range of web search queries. We observe that BatchRank outperforms ranked bandits and is more robust than CascadeKL-UCB, an existing algorithm for the cascade model.
Machine Learning (ML) has been successfully applied to a wide range of domains and applications. One of the techniques behind most of these successful applications is Ensemble Learning (EL), the field of ML that gave birth to methods such as Random Forests or Boosting. The complexity of applying these techniques together with the market scarcity on ML experts, has created the need for systems that enable a fast and easy drop-in replacement for ML libraries. Automated machine learning (autoML) is the field of ML that attempts to answers these needs. Typically, these systems rely on optimization techniques such as bayesian optimization to lead the search for the best model. Our approach differs from these systems by making use of the most recent advances on metalearning and a learning to rank approach to learn from metadata. We propose autoBagging, an autoML system that automatically ranks 63 bagging workflows by exploiting past performance and dataset characterization. Results on 140 classification datasets from the OpenML platform show that autoBagging can yield better performance than the Average Rank method and achieve results that are not statistically different from an ideal model that systematically selects the best workflow for each dataset. For the purpose of reproducibility and generalizability, autoBagging is publicly available as an R package on CRAN.
The heterogeneity-gap between different modalities brings a significant challenge to multimedia information retrieval. Some studies formalize the cross-modal retrieval tasks as a ranking problem and learn a shared multi-modal embedding space to measure the cross-modality similarity. However, previous methods often establish the shared embedding space based on linear mapping functions which might not be sophisticated enough to reveal more complicated inter-modal correspondences. Additionally, current studies assume that the rankings are of equal importance, and thus all rankings are used simultaneously, or a small number of rankings are selected randomly to train the embedding space at each iteration. Such strategies, however, always suffer from outliers as well as reduced generalization capability due to their lack of insightful understanding of procedure of human cognition. In this paper, we involve the self-paced learning theory with diversity into the cross-modal learning to rank and learn an optimal multi-modal embedding space based on non-linear mapping functions. This strategy enhances the model's robustness to outliers and achieves better generalization via training the model gradually from easy rankings by diverse queries to more complex ones. An efficient alternative algorithm is exploited to solve the proposed challenging problem with fast convergence in practice. Extensive experimental results on several benchmark datasets indicate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-arts in this literature.
List-wise learning to rank methods are considered to be the state-of-the-art. One of the major problems with these methods is that the ambiguous nature of relevance labels in learning to rank data is ignored. Ambiguity of relevance labels refers to the phenomenon that multiple documents may be assigned the same relevance label for a given query, so that no preference order should be learned for those documents. In this paper we propose a novel sampling technique for computing a list-wise loss that can take into account this ambiguity. We show the effectiveness of the proposed method by training a 3-layer deep neural network. We compare our new loss function to two strong baselines: ListNet and ListMLE. We show that our method generalizes better and significantly outperforms other methods on the validation and test sets.
A significant part of the largest Knowledge Graph today, the Linked Open Data cloud, consists of metadata about documents such as publications, news reports, and other media articles. While the widespread access to the document metadata is a tremendous advancement, it is yet not so easy to assign semantic annotations and organize the documents along semantic concepts. Providing semantic annotations like concepts in SKOS thesauri is a classical research topic, but typically it is conducted on the full-text of the documents. For the first time, we offer a systematic comparison of classification approaches to investigate how far semantic annotations can be conducted using just the metadata of the documents such as titles published as labels on the Linked Open Data cloud. We compare the classifications obtained from analyzing the documents' titles with semantic annotations obtained from analyzing the full-text. Apart from the prominent text classification baselines kNN and SVM, we also compare recent techniques of Learning to Rank and neural networks and revisit the traditional methods logistic regression, Rocchio, and Naive Bayes. The results show that across three of our four datasets, the performance of the classifications using only titles reaches over 90% of the quality compared to the classification performance when using the full-text. Thus, conducting document classification by just using the titles is a reasonable approach for automated semantic annotation and opens up new possibilities for enriching Knowledge Graphs.
The main approach of traditional information retrieval (IR) is to examine how many words from a query appear in a document. A drawback of this approach, however, is that it may fail to detect relevant documents where no or only few words from a query are found. The semantic analysis methods such as LSA (latent semantic analysis) and LDA (latent Dirichlet allocation) have been proposed to address the issue, but their performance is not superior compared to common IR approaches. Here we present a query-document similarity measure motivated by the Word Mover's Distance. Unlike other similarity measures, the proposed method relies on neural word embeddings to compute the distance between words. This process helps identify related words when no direct matches are found between a query and a document. Our method is efficient and straightforward to implement. The experimental results on TREC Genomics data show that our approach outperforms the BM25 ranking function by an average of 12% in mean average precision. Furthermore, for a real-world dataset collected from the PubMed search logs, we combine the semantic measure with BM25 using a learning to rank method, which leads to improved ranking scores by up to 25%. This experiment demonstrates that the proposed approach and BM25 nicely complement each other and together produce superior performance.
This paper studies the evaluation of policies that recommend an ordered set of items (e.g., a ranking) based on some context---a common scenario in web search, ads, and recommendation. We build on techniques from combinatorial bandits to introduce a new practical estimator that uses logged data to estimate a policy's performance. A thorough empirical evaluation on real-world data reveals that our estimator is accurate in a variety of settings, including as a subroutine in a learning-to-rank task, where it achieves competitive performance. We derive conditions under which our estimator is unbiased---these conditions are weaker than prior heuristics for slate evaluation---and experimentally demonstrate a smaller bias than parametric approaches, even when these conditions are violated. Finally, our theory and experiments also show exponential savings in the amount of required data compared with general unbiased estimators.
We propose a new learning to rank algorithm, named Weighted Margin-Rank Batch loss (WMRB), to extend the popular Weighted Approximate-Rank Pairwise loss (WARP). WMRB uses a new rank estimator and an efficient batch training algorithm. The approach allows more accurate item rank approximation and explicit utilization of parallel computation to accelerate training. In three item recommendation tasks, WMRB consistently outperforms WARP and other baselines. Moreover, WMRB shows clear time efficiency advantages as data scale increases.
Networked data, in which every training example involves two objects and may share some common objects with others, is used in many machine learning tasks such as learning to rank and link prediction. A challenge of learning from networked examples is that target values are not known for some pairs of objects. In this case, neither the classical i.i.d.\ assumption nor techniques based on complete U-statistics can be used. Most existing theoretical results of this problem only deal with the classical empirical risk minimization (ERM) principle that always weights every example equally, but this strategy leads to unsatisfactory bounds. We consider general weighted ERM and show new universal risk bounds for this problem. These new bounds naturally define an optimization problem which leads to appropriate weights for networked examples. Though this optimization problem is not convex in general, we devise a new fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) to solve it.
Object ranking or "learning to rank" is an important problem in the realm of preference learning. On the basis of training data in the form of a set of rankings of objects represented as feature vectors, the goal is to learn a ranking function that predicts a linear order of any new set of objects. In this paper, we propose a new approach to object ranking based on principles of analogical reasoning. More specifically, our inference pattern is formalized in terms of so-called analogical proportions and can be summarized as follows: Given objects $A,B,C,D$, if object $A$ is known to be preferred to $B$, and $C$ relates to $D$ as $A$ relates to $B$, then $C$ is (supposedly) preferred to $D$. Our method applies this pattern as a main building block and combines it with ideas and techniques from instance-based learning and rank aggregation. Based on first experimental results for data sets from various domains (sports, education, tourism, etc.), we conclude that our approach is highly competitive. It appears to be specifically interesting in situations in which the objects are coming from different subdomains, and which hence require a kind of knowledge transfer.
In information retrieval, learning to rank constructs a machine-based ranking model which given a query, sorts the search results by their degree of relevance or importance to the query. Neural networks have been successfully applied to this problem, and in this paper, we propose an attention-based deep neural network which better incorporates different embeddings of the queries and search results with an attention-based mechanism. This model also applies a decoder mechanism to learn the ranks of the search results in a listwise fashion. The embeddings are trained with convolutional neural networks or the word2vec model. We demonstrate the performance of this model with image retrieval and text querying data sets.
We have witnessed rapid evolution of deep neural network architecture design in the past years. These latest progresses greatly facilitate the developments in various areas such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, along with the extraordinary performance, these state-of-the-art models also bring in expensive computational cost. Directly deploying these models into applications with real-time requirement is still infeasible. Recently, Hinton etal. have shown that the dark knowledge within a powerful teacher model can significantly help the training of a smaller and faster student network. These knowledge are vastly beneficial to improve the generalization ability of the student model. Inspired by their work, we introduce a new type of knowledge -- cross sample similarities for model compression and acceleration. This knowledge can be naturally derived from deep metric learning model. To transfer them, we bring the "learning to rank" technique into deep metric learning formulation. We test our proposed DarkRank method on various metric learning tasks including pedestrian re-identification, image retrieval and image clustering. The results are quite encouraging. Our method can improve over the baseline method by a large margin. Moreover, it is fully compatible with other existing methods. When combined, the performance can be further boosted.
In ranking problems, the goal is to learn a ranking function from labeled pairs of input points. In this paper, we consider the related comparison problem, where the label indicates which element of the pair is better, or if there is no significant difference. We cast the learning problem as a margin maximization, and show that it can be solved by converting it to a standard SVM. We use simulated nonlinear patterns, a real learning to rank sushi data set, and a chess data set to show that our proposed SVMcompare algorithm outperforms SVMrank when there are equality pairs.