Lecture slides presented at Northeastern University (December, 2020).
Learning to rank (LTR) for information retrieval (IR) involves the application of machine learning models to rank artifacts, such as webpages, in response to user's need, which may be expressed as a query. LTR models typically employ training data, such as human relevance labels and click data, to discriminatively train towards an IR objective. The focus of this lecture will be on the fundamentals of neural networks and their applications to learning to rank.
Tutorial presented at ACM SIGIR/SIGKDD Africa Summer School on Machine Learning for Data Mining and Search (AFIRM 2020) conference in Cape Town, South Africa.
Learning to rank (LTR) for information retrieval (IR) involves the application of machine learning models to rank artifacts, such as items to be recommended, in response to user's need. LTR models typically employ training data, such as human relevance labels and click data, to discriminatively train towards an IR objective. The focus of this tutorial will be on the fundamentals of neural networks and their applications to learning to rank.
Tutorial presented at ACM SIGIR/SIGKDD Africa Summer School on Machine Learning for Data Mining and Search (AFIRM 2020) conference in Cape Town, South Africa.
Learning to rank (LTR) for information retrieval (IR) involves the application of machine learning models to rank artifacts, such as items to be recommended, in response to user's need. LTR models typically employ training data, such as human relevance labels and click data, to discriminatively train towards an IR objective. The focus of this tutorial will be on the fundamentals of neural networks and their applications to learning to rank.
Deep Learning in Recommender Systems - RecSys Summer School 2017Balázs Hidasi
This is the presentation accompanying my tutorial about deep learning methods in the recommender systems domain. The tutorial consists of a brief general overview of deep learning and the introduction of the four most prominent research direction of DL in recsys as of 2017. Presented during RecSys Summer School 2017 in Bolzano, Italy.
https://telecombcn-dl.github.io/2017-dlai/
Deep learning technologies are at the core of the current revolution in artificial intelligence for multimedia data analysis. The convergence of large-scale annotated datasets and affordable GPU hardware has allowed the training of neural networks for data analysis tasks which were previously addressed with hand-crafted features. Architectures such as convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks or Q-nets for reinforcement learning have shaped a brand new scenario in signal processing. This course will cover the basic principles of deep learning from both an algorithmic and computational perspectives.
https://telecombcn-dl.github.io/2018-dlai/
Deep learning technologies are at the core of the current revolution in artificial intelligence for multimedia data analysis. The convergence of large-scale annotated datasets and affordable GPU hardware has allowed the training of neural networks for data analysis tasks which were previously addressed with hand-crafted features. Architectures such as convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks or Q-nets for reinforcement learning have shaped a brand new scenario in signal processing. This course will cover the basic principles of deep learning from both an algorithmic and computational perspectives.
With the explosive growth of online information, recommender system has been an effective tool to overcome information overload and promote sales. In recent years, deep learning's revolutionary advances in speech recognition, image analysis and natural language processing have gained significant attention. Meanwhile, recent studies also demonstrate its efficacy in coping with information retrieval and recommendation tasks. Applying deep learning techniques into recommender system has been gaining momentum due to its state-of-the-art performance. In this talk, I will present recent development of deep learning based recommender models and highlight some future challenges and open issues of this research field.
This presentation focuses on Deep Learning (DL) concepts, such as neural networks, backprop, activation functions, and Convolutional Neural Networks, followed by a TypeScript-based code sample that replicates the Tensorflow playground. Basic knowledge of matrices is helpful for this session.
Social networks are not new, even though websites like Facebook and Twitter might make you want to believe they are; and trust me- I’m not talking about Myspace! Social networks are extremely interesting models for human behavior, whose study dates back to the early twentieth century. However, because of those websites, data scientists have access to much more data than the anthropologists who studied the networks of tribes!
Because networks take a relationship-centered view of the world, the data structures that we will analyze model real world behaviors and community. Through a suite of algorithms derived from mathematical Graph theory we are able to compute and predict behavior of individuals and communities through these types of analyses. Clearly this has a number of practical applications from recommendation to law enforcement to election prediction, and more.
[Paper reading] L-SHAPLEY AND C-SHAPLEY: EFFICIENT MODEL INTERPRETATION FOR S...Daiki Tanaka
paper at ICML 2019; "L-SHAPLEY AND C-SHAPLEY: EFFICIENT MODEL INTERPRETATION FOR STRUCTURED DATA"
openr eview link : https://openreview.net/forum?id=S1E3Ko09F7
Gradient Boosted Regression Trees in scikit-learnDataRobot
Slides of the talk "Gradient Boosted Regression Trees in scikit-learn" by Peter Prettenhofer and Gilles Louppe held at PyData London 2014.
Abstract:
This talk describes Gradient Boosted Regression Trees (GBRT), a powerful statistical learning technique with applications in a variety of areas, ranging from web page ranking to environmental niche modeling. GBRT is a key ingredient of many winning solutions in data-mining competitions such as the Netflix Prize, the GE Flight Quest, or the Heritage Health Price.
I will give a brief introduction to the GBRT model and regression trees -- focusing on intuition rather than mathematical formulas. The majority of the talk will be dedicated to an in depth discussion how to apply GBRT in practice using scikit-learn. We will cover important topics such as regularization, model tuning and model interpretation that should significantly improve your score on Kaggle.
* ML in HEP
* classification and regression
* knn classification and regression
* ROC curve
* optimal bayesian classifier
* Fisher's QDA
* intro to Logistic Regression
Learning to rank (LTR) for information retrieval (IR) involves the application of machine learning models to rank artifacts, such as webpages, in response to user's need, which may be expressed as a query. LTR models typically employ training data, such as human relevance labels and click data, to discriminatively train towards an IR objective. The focus of this lecture will be on the fundamentals of neural networks and their applications to learning to rank.
https://telecombcn-dl.github.io/2017-dlai/
Deep learning technologies are at the core of the current revolution in artificial intelligence for multimedia data analysis. The convergence of large-scale annotated datasets and affordable GPU hardware has allowed the training of neural networks for data analysis tasks which were previously addressed with hand-crafted features. Architectures such as convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks or Q-nets for reinforcement learning have shaped a brand new scenario in signal processing. This course will cover the basic principles of deep learning from both an algorithmic and computational perspectives.
Deep Learning in Recommender Systems - RecSys Summer School 2017Balázs Hidasi
This is the presentation accompanying my tutorial about deep learning methods in the recommender systems domain. The tutorial consists of a brief general overview of deep learning and the introduction of the four most prominent research direction of DL in recsys as of 2017. Presented during RecSys Summer School 2017 in Bolzano, Italy.
https://telecombcn-dl.github.io/2017-dlai/
Deep learning technologies are at the core of the current revolution in artificial intelligence for multimedia data analysis. The convergence of large-scale annotated datasets and affordable GPU hardware has allowed the training of neural networks for data analysis tasks which were previously addressed with hand-crafted features. Architectures such as convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks or Q-nets for reinforcement learning have shaped a brand new scenario in signal processing. This course will cover the basic principles of deep learning from both an algorithmic and computational perspectives.
https://telecombcn-dl.github.io/2018-dlai/
Deep learning technologies are at the core of the current revolution in artificial intelligence for multimedia data analysis. The convergence of large-scale annotated datasets and affordable GPU hardware has allowed the training of neural networks for data analysis tasks which were previously addressed with hand-crafted features. Architectures such as convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks or Q-nets for reinforcement learning have shaped a brand new scenario in signal processing. This course will cover the basic principles of deep learning from both an algorithmic and computational perspectives.
With the explosive growth of online information, recommender system has been an effective tool to overcome information overload and promote sales. In recent years, deep learning's revolutionary advances in speech recognition, image analysis and natural language processing have gained significant attention. Meanwhile, recent studies also demonstrate its efficacy in coping with information retrieval and recommendation tasks. Applying deep learning techniques into recommender system has been gaining momentum due to its state-of-the-art performance. In this talk, I will present recent development of deep learning based recommender models and highlight some future challenges and open issues of this research field.
This presentation focuses on Deep Learning (DL) concepts, such as neural networks, backprop, activation functions, and Convolutional Neural Networks, followed by a TypeScript-based code sample that replicates the Tensorflow playground. Basic knowledge of matrices is helpful for this session.
Social networks are not new, even though websites like Facebook and Twitter might make you want to believe they are; and trust me- I’m not talking about Myspace! Social networks are extremely interesting models for human behavior, whose study dates back to the early twentieth century. However, because of those websites, data scientists have access to much more data than the anthropologists who studied the networks of tribes!
Because networks take a relationship-centered view of the world, the data structures that we will analyze model real world behaviors and community. Through a suite of algorithms derived from mathematical Graph theory we are able to compute and predict behavior of individuals and communities through these types of analyses. Clearly this has a number of practical applications from recommendation to law enforcement to election prediction, and more.
[Paper reading] L-SHAPLEY AND C-SHAPLEY: EFFICIENT MODEL INTERPRETATION FOR S...Daiki Tanaka
paper at ICML 2019; "L-SHAPLEY AND C-SHAPLEY: EFFICIENT MODEL INTERPRETATION FOR STRUCTURED DATA"
openr eview link : https://openreview.net/forum?id=S1E3Ko09F7
Gradient Boosted Regression Trees in scikit-learnDataRobot
Slides of the talk "Gradient Boosted Regression Trees in scikit-learn" by Peter Prettenhofer and Gilles Louppe held at PyData London 2014.
Abstract:
This talk describes Gradient Boosted Regression Trees (GBRT), a powerful statistical learning technique with applications in a variety of areas, ranging from web page ranking to environmental niche modeling. GBRT is a key ingredient of many winning solutions in data-mining competitions such as the Netflix Prize, the GE Flight Quest, or the Heritage Health Price.
I will give a brief introduction to the GBRT model and regression trees -- focusing on intuition rather than mathematical formulas. The majority of the talk will be dedicated to an in depth discussion how to apply GBRT in practice using scikit-learn. We will cover important topics such as regularization, model tuning and model interpretation that should significantly improve your score on Kaggle.
* ML in HEP
* classification and regression
* knn classification and regression
* ROC curve
* optimal bayesian classifier
* Fisher's QDA
* intro to Logistic Regression
Learning to rank (LTR) for information retrieval (IR) involves the application of machine learning models to rank artifacts, such as webpages, in response to user's need, which may be expressed as a query. LTR models typically employ training data, such as human relevance labels and click data, to discriminatively train towards an IR objective. The focus of this lecture will be on the fundamentals of neural networks and their applications to learning to rank.
https://telecombcn-dl.github.io/2017-dlai/
Deep learning technologies are at the core of the current revolution in artificial intelligence for multimedia data analysis. The convergence of large-scale annotated datasets and affordable GPU hardware has allowed the training of neural networks for data analysis tasks which were previously addressed with hand-crafted features. Architectures such as convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks or Q-nets for reinforcement learning have shaped a brand new scenario in signal processing. This course will cover the basic principles of deep learning from both an algorithmic and computational perspectives.
https://telecombcn-dl.github.io/2018-dlai/
Deep learning technologies are at the core of the current revolution in artificial intelligence for multimedia data analysis. The convergence of large-scale annotated datasets and affordable GPU hardware has allowed the training of neural networks for data analysis tasks which were previously addressed with hand-crafted features. Architectures such as convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks or Q-nets for reinforcement learning have shaped a brand new scenario in signal processing. This course will cover the basic principles of deep learning from both an algorithmic and computational perspectives.
Tong is a data scientist in Supstat Inc and also a master students of Data Mining. He has been an active R programmer and developer for 5 years. He is the author of the R package of XGBoost, one of the most popular and contest-winning tools on kaggle.com nowadays.
Agenda:
Introduction of Xgboost
Real World Application
Model Specification
Parameter Introduction
Advanced Features
Kaggle Winning Solution
Data Science and Machine Learning with TensorflowShubham Sharma
Importance of Machine Learning and AI – Emerging applications, end-use
Pictures (Amazon recommendations, Driverless Cars)
Relationship betweeen Data Science and AI .
Overall structure and components
What tools can be used – technologies, packages
List of tools and their classification
List of frameworks
Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks
Basics Of ML,AI,Neural Networks with implementations
Machine Learning Depth : Regression Models
Linear Regression : Math Behind
Non Linear Regression : Math Behind
Machine Learning Depth : Classification Models
Decision Trees : Math Behind
Deep Learning
Mathematics Behind Neural Networks
Terminologies
What are the opportunities for data analytics professionals
MS CS - Selecting Machine Learning AlgorithmKaniska Mandal
ML Algorithms usually solve an optimization problem such that we need to find parameters for a given model that minimizes
— Loss function (prediction error)
— Model simplicity (regularization)
Machine learning in science and industry — day 1arogozhnikov
A course of machine learning in science and industry.
- notions and applications
- nearest neighbours: search and machine learning algorithms
- roc curve
- optimal classification and regression
- density estimation
- Gaussian mixtures and EM algorithm
- clustering, an example of clustering in the opera
Search and Society: Reimagining Information Access for Radical FuturesBhaskar Mitra
The field of Information retrieval (IR) is currently undergoing a transformative shift, at least partly due to the emerging applications of generative AI to information access. In this talk, we will deliberate on the sociotechnical implications of generative AI for information access. We will argue that there is both a critical necessity and an exciting opportunity for the IR community to re-center our research agendas on societal needs while dismantling the artificial separation between the work on fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in IR and the rest of IR research. Instead of adopting a reactionary strategy of trying to mitigate potential social harms from emerging technologies, the community should aim to proactively set the research agenda for the kinds of systems we should build inspired by diverse explicitly stated sociotechnical imaginaries. The sociotechnical imaginaries that underpin the design and development of information access technologies needs to be explicitly articulated, and we need to develop theories of change in context of these diverse perspectives. Our guiding future imaginaries must be informed by other academic fields, such as democratic theory and critical theory, and should be co-developed with social science scholars, legal scholars, civil rights and social justice activists, and artists, among others.
Joint Multisided Exposure Fairness for Search and RecommendationBhaskar Mitra
(Slides from my talk at SEA: Search Engines Amsterdam)
Online information access systems, like recommender systems and search, mediate what information gets exposure and thereby influence their consumption at scale. There is a growing body of evidence that information retrieval (IR) algorithms that narrowly focus on maximizing ranking utility of retrieved items may disparately expose items of similar relevance from the collection. Such disparities in exposure outcome raise concerns of algorithmic fairness and bias of moral import, and may contribute to both representational harms—by reinforcing negative stereotypes and perpetuating inequities in representation of women and other historically marginalized peoples—and allocative harms, from disparate exposure to economic opportunities. In this talk, we present a framework of exposure fairness metrics that model the problem jointly from the perspective of both the consumers and producers. Specifically, we consider group attributes for both types of stakeholders to identify and mitigate fairness concerns that go beyond individual users and items towards more systemic biases in retrieval.
What’s next for deep learning for Search?Bhaskar Mitra
In this talk, I will share some of my personal reflections on the progress in the field of neural IR and some of the ongoing and future research directions that I am personally excited about. This talk will be informed by my own research in this area as well as my experience both as a developer/organizer of the MS MARCO benchmark and the TREC Deep Learning Track and as an applied researcher previously working on web scale search systems at Bing. My goal in this talk would be to move the conversation beyond neural reranking models towards a richer and bolder vision of search powered by deep learning.
So, You Want to Release a Dataset? Reflections on Benchmark Development, Comm...Bhaskar Mitra
In this talk, I share some of my personal reflections and learnings on benchmark development and community building for making robust scientific progress. This talk is informed by my experience as a developer of the MS MARCO benchmark and as an organizer of the TREC Deep Learning Track. My goal in this talk is to situate the act of releasing a dataset in the context of broader research visions and to draw due attention to considerations of scientific and social outcomes that are invariably salient in the acts of dataset creation and distribution.
Efficient Machine Learning and Machine Learning for Efficiency in Information...Bhaskar Mitra
Emerging machine learning approaches, including deep learning methods, for information retrieval (IR) have recently demonstrated significant improvements in accuracy of relevance estimation at the cost of increasing model complexity and corresponding rise in computational and environmental costs of training and inference. In web search, these costs are further compounded by the necessity to train on large-scale datasets, consume long documents as inputs, and retrieve relevant documents from web-scale collections within milliseconds in response to high volume query traffic. A typical playbook for developing deep learning models for IR involves largely ignoring efficiency concerns during model development and then later scaling these methods by either finding faster approximations of the same models or employing heuristics to reduce the input space over which these models operate. Domain knowledge about the specific IR task and deeper understanding of system design and data structures in whose context these models are deployed can significantly help with not only model simplification but also to inform data-structure specific machine learning model design. Alternatively, predictive machine learning can also be employed specifically to improve efficiency in large scale IR settings. In this talk, I will cover several case studies for both improving efficiency of machine learning models for IR as well as direct application of machine learning to improve retrieval efficiency, and conclude with a brief discussion on potential future directions for efficiency-sensitive benchmarking of machine learning models for IR.
Multisided Exposure Fairness for Search and RecommendationBhaskar Mitra
Online information access systems, like recommender systems and search, mediate what information gets exposure and thereby influence their consumption at scale. There is a growing body of evidence that information retrieval (IR) algorithms that narrowly focus on maximizing ranking utility of retrieved items may disparately expose items of similar relevance from the collection. Such disparities in exposure outcome raise concerns of algorithmic fairness and bias of moral import, and may contribute to both representational harms—by reinforcing negative stereotypes and perpetuating inequities in representation of women and other historically marginalized peoples—and allocative harms, from disparate exposure to economic opportunities. In this talk, we present a framework of exposure fairness metrics that model the problem jointly from the perspective of both the consumers and producers. Specifically, we consider group attributes for both types of stakeholders to identify and mitigate fairness concerns that go beyond individual users and items towards more systemic biases in retrieval. The development of expected exposure based metrics also opens up new opportunities and challenges for model optimization. We demonstrate how stochastic ranking policies can be optimized towards target expected exposure and highlight the trade-offs that may exist in optimizing for different fairness dimensions.
Neural Information Retrieval: In search of meaningful progressBhaskar Mitra
The emergence of deep learning based methods for search poses several challenges and opportunities not just for modeling, but also for benchmarking and measuring progress in the field. Some of these challenges are new, while others have evolved from existing challenges in IR benchmarking exacerbated by the scale at which deep learning models operate. Evaluation efforts such as the TREC Deep Learning track and the MS MARCO public leaderboard are intended to encourage research and track our progress, addressing big questions in our field. The goal is not simply to identify which run is "best" but to move the field forward by developing new robust techniques, that work in many different settings, and are adopted in research and practice. This entails a wider conversation in the IR community about what constitutes meaningful progress, how benchmark design can encourage or discourage certain outcomes, and about the validity of our findings. In this talk, I will present a brief overview of what we have learned from our work on MS MARCO and the TREC Deep Learning track--and reflect on the state of the field and the road ahead.
Conformer-Kernel with Query Term Independence @ TREC 2020 Deep Learning TrackBhaskar Mitra
We benchmark Conformer-Kernel models under the strict blind evaluation setting of the TREC 2020 Deep Learning track. In particular, we study the impact of incorporating: (i) Explicit term matching to complement matching based on learned representations (i.e., the “Duet principle”), (ii) query term independence (i.e., the “QTI assumption”) to scale the model to the full retrieval setting, and (iii) the ORCAS click data as an additional document description field. We find evidence which supports that all three aforementioned strategies can lead to improved retrieval quality.
This report discusses three submissions based on the Duet architecture to the Deep Learning track at TREC 2019. For the document retrieval task, we adapt the Duet model to ingest a "multiple field" view of documents—we refer to the new architecture as Duet with Multiple Fields (DuetMF). A second submission combines the DuetMF model with other neural and traditional relevance estimators in a learning-to-rank framework and achieves improved performance over the DuetMF baseline. For the passage retrieval task, we submit a single run based on an ensemble of eight Duet models.
Benchmarking for Neural Information Retrieval: MS MARCO, TREC, and BeyondBhaskar Mitra
The emergence of deep learning-based methods for information retrieval (IR) poses several challenges and opportunities for benchmarking. Some of these are new, while others have evolved from existing challenges in IR exacerbated by the scale at which deep learning models operate. In this talk, I will present a brief overview of what we have learned from our work on MS MARCO and the TREC Deep Learning track, and reflect on the road ahead.
Deep neural methods have recently demonstrated significant performance improvements in several IR tasks. In this lecture, we will present a brief overview of deep models for ranking and retrieval.
This is a follow-up lecture to "Neural Learning to Rank" (https://www.slideshare.net/BhaskarMitra3/neural-learning-to-rank-231759858)
A fundamental goal of search engines is to identify, given a query, documents that have relevant text. This is intrinsically difficult because the query and the document may use different vocabulary, or the document may contain query words without being relevant. We investigate neural word embeddings as a source of evidence in document ranking. We train a word2vec embedding model on a large unlabelled query corpus, but in contrast to how the model is commonly used, we retain both the input and the output projections, allowing us to leverage both the embedding spaces to derive richer distributional relationships. During ranking we map the query words into the input space and the document words into the output space, and compute a query-document relevance score by aggregating the cosine similarities across all the query-document word pairs.
We postulate that the proposed Dual Embedding Space Model (DESM) captures evidence on whether a document is about a query term in addition to what is modelled by traditional term-frequency based approaches. Our experiments show that the DESM can re-rank top documents returned by a commercial Web search engine, like Bing, better than a term-matching based signal like TF-IDF. However, when ranking a larger set of candidate documents, we find the embeddings-based approach is prone to false positives, retrieving documents that are only loosely related to the query. We demonstrate that this problem can be solved effectively by ranking based on a linear mixture of the DESM and the word counting features.
Adversarial and reinforcement learning-based approaches to information retrievalBhaskar Mitra
Traditionally, machine learning based approaches to information retrieval have taken the form of supervised learning-to-rank models. Recently, other machine learning approaches—such as adversarial learning and reinforcement learning—have started to find interesting applications in retrieval systems. At Bing, we have been exploring some of these methods in the context of web search. In this talk, I will share couple of our recent work in this area that we presented at SIGIR 2018.
5 Lessons Learned from Designing Neural Models for Information RetrievalBhaskar Mitra
Slides from my keynote talk at the Recherche d'Information SEmantique (RISE) workshop at CORIA-TALN 2018 conference in Rennes, France.
(Abstract)
Neural Information Retrieval (or neural IR) is the application of shallow or deep neural networks to IR tasks. Unlike classical IR models, these machine learning (ML) based approaches are data-hungry, requiring large scale training data before they can be deployed. Traditional learning to rank models employ supervised ML techniques—including neural networks—over hand-crafted IR features. By contrast, more recently proposed neural models learn representations of language from raw text that can bridge the gap between the query and the document vocabulary.
Neural IR is an emerging field and research publications in the area has been increasing in recent years. While the community explores new architectures and training regimes, a new set of challenges, opportunities, and design principles are emerging in the context of these new IR models. In this talk, I will share five lessons learned from my personal research in the area of neural IR. I will present a framework for discussing different unsupervised approaches to learning latent representations of text. I will cover several challenges to learning effective text representations for IR and discuss how latent space models should be combined with observed feature spaces for better retrieval performance. Finally, I will conclude with a few case studies that demonstrates the application of neural approaches to IR that go beyond text matching.
A Simple Introduction to Neural Information RetrievalBhaskar Mitra
Neural Information Retrieval (or neural IR) is the application of shallow or deep neural networks to IR tasks. In this lecture, we will cover some of the fundamentals of neural representation learning for text retrieval. We will also discuss some of the recent advances in the applications of deep neural architectures to retrieval tasks.
(These slides were presented at a lecture as part of the Information Retrieval and Data Mining course taught at UCL.)
Neural Models for Information RetrievalBhaskar Mitra
In the last few years, neural representation learning approaches have achieved very good performance on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as language modelling and machine translation. This suggests that neural models may also yield significant performance improvements on information retrieval (IR) tasks, such as relevance ranking, addressing the query-document vocabulary mismatch problem by using semantic rather than lexical matching. IR tasks, however, are fundamentally different from NLP tasks leading to new challenges and opportunities for existing neural representation learning approaches for text.
In this talk, I will present my recent work on neural IR models. We begin with a discussion on learning good representations of text for retrieval. I will present visual intuitions about how different embeddings spaces capture different relationships between items, and their usefulness to different types of IR tasks. The second part of this talk is focused on the applications of deep neural architectures to the document ranking task.
Neural Models for Information RetrievalBhaskar Mitra
In the last few years, neural representation learning approaches have achieved very good performance on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as language modelling and machine translation. This suggests that neural models will also yield significant performance improvements on information retrieval (IR) tasks, such as relevance ranking, addressing the query-document vocabulary mismatch problem by using semantic rather than lexical matching. IR tasks, however, are fundamentally different from NLP tasks leading to new challenges and opportunities for existing neural representation learning approaches for text.
We begin this talk with a discussion on text embedding spaces for modelling different types of relationships between items which makes them suitable for different IR tasks. Next, we present how topic-specific representations can be more effective than learning global embeddings. Finally, we conclude with an emphasis on dealing with rare terms and concepts for IR, and how embedding based approaches can be augmented with neural models for lexical matching for better retrieval performance. While our discussions are grounded in IR tasks, the findings and the insights covered during this talk should be generally applicable to other NLP and machine learning tasks.
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
State of ICS and IoT Cyber Threat Landscape Report 2024 previewPrayukth K V
The IoT and OT threat landscape report has been prepared by the Threat Research Team at Sectrio using data from Sectrio, cyber threat intelligence farming facilities spread across over 85 cities around the world. In addition, Sectrio also runs AI-based advanced threat and payload engagement facilities that serve as sinks to attract and engage sophisticated threat actors, and newer malware including new variants and latent threats that are at an earlier stage of development.
The latest edition of the OT/ICS and IoT security Threat Landscape Report 2024 also covers:
State of global ICS asset and network exposure
Sectoral targets and attacks as well as the cost of ransom
Global APT activity, AI usage, actor and tactic profiles, and implications
Rise in volumes of AI-powered cyberattacks
Major cyber events in 2024
Malware and malicious payload trends
Cyberattack types and targets
Vulnerability exploit attempts on CVEs
Attacks on counties – USA
Expansion of bot farms – how, where, and why
In-depth analysis of the cyber threat landscape across North America, South America, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East
Why are attacks on smart factories rising?
Cyber risk predictions
Axis of attacks – Europe
Systemic attacks in the Middle East
Download the full report from here:
https://sectrio.com/resources/ot-threat-landscape-reports/sectrio-releases-ot-ics-and-iot-security-threat-landscape-report-2024/
GraphSummit Singapore | The Future of Agility: Supercharging Digital Transfor...Neo4j
Leonard Jayamohan, Partner & Generative AI Lead, Deloitte
This keynote will reveal how Deloitte leverages Neo4j’s graph power for groundbreaking digital twin solutions, achieving a staggering 100x performance boost. Discover the essential role knowledge graphs play in successful generative AI implementations. Plus, get an exclusive look at an innovative Neo4j + Generative AI solution Deloitte is developing in-house.
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
Why You Should Replace Windows 11 with Nitrux Linux 3.5.0 for enhanced perfor...SOFTTECHHUB
The choice of an operating system plays a pivotal role in shaping our computing experience. For decades, Microsoft's Windows has dominated the market, offering a familiar and widely adopted platform for personal and professional use. However, as technological advancements continue to push the boundaries of innovation, alternative operating systems have emerged, challenging the status quo and offering users a fresh perspective on computing.
One such alternative that has garnered significant attention and acclaim is Nitrux Linux 3.5.0, a sleek, powerful, and user-friendly Linux distribution that promises to redefine the way we interact with our devices. With its focus on performance, security, and customization, Nitrux Linux presents a compelling case for those seeking to break free from the constraints of proprietary software and embrace the freedom and flexibility of open-source computing.
GridMate - End to end testing is a critical piece to ensure quality and avoid...ThomasParaiso2
End to end testing is a critical piece to ensure quality and avoid regressions. In this session, we share our journey building an E2E testing pipeline for GridMate components (LWC and Aura) using Cypress, JSForce, FakerJS…
Removing Uninteresting Bytes in Software FuzzingAftab Hussain
Imagine a world where software fuzzing, the process of mutating bytes in test seeds to uncover hidden and erroneous program behaviors, becomes faster and more effective. A lot depends on the initial seeds, which can significantly dictate the trajectory of a fuzzing campaign, particularly in terms of how long it takes to uncover interesting behaviour in your code. We introduce DIAR, a technique designed to speedup fuzzing campaigns by pinpointing and eliminating those uninteresting bytes in the seeds. Picture this: instead of wasting valuable resources on meaningless mutations in large, bloated seeds, DIAR removes the unnecessary bytes, streamlining the entire process.
In this work, we equipped AFL, a popular fuzzer, with DIAR and examined two critical Linux libraries -- Libxml's xmllint, a tool for parsing xml documents, and Binutil's readelf, an essential debugging and security analysis command-line tool used to display detailed information about ELF (Executable and Linkable Format). Our preliminary results show that AFL+DIAR does not only discover new paths more quickly but also achieves higher coverage overall. This work thus showcases how starting with lean and optimized seeds can lead to faster, more comprehensive fuzzing campaigns -- and DIAR helps you find such seeds.
- These are slides of the talk given at IEEE International Conference on Software Testing Verification and Validation Workshop, ICSTW 2022.
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
Pushing the limits of ePRTC: 100ns holdover for 100 daysAdtran
At WSTS 2024, Alon Stern explored the topic of parametric holdover and explained how recent research findings can be implemented in real-world PNT networks to achieve 100 nanoseconds of accuracy for up to 100 days.
GraphSummit Singapore | The Art of the Possible with Graph - Q2 2024Neo4j
Neha Bajwa, Vice President of Product Marketing, Neo4j
Join us as we explore breakthrough innovations enabled by interconnected data and AI. Discover firsthand how organizations use relationships in data to uncover contextual insights and solve our most pressing challenges – from optimizing supply chains, detecting fraud, and improving customer experiences to accelerating drug discoveries.
In his public lecture, Christian Timmerer provides insights into the fascinating history of video streaming, starting from its humble beginnings before YouTube to the groundbreaking technologies that now dominate platforms like Netflix and ORF ON. Timmerer also presents provocative contributions of his own that have significantly influenced the industry. He concludes by looking at future challenges and invites the audience to join in a discussion.
Unlocking Productivity: Leveraging the Potential of Copilot in Microsoft 365, a presentation by Christoforos Vlachos, Senior Solutions Manager – Modern Workplace, Uni Systems
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and Sales
Neural Learning to Rank
1. Neural Learning to Rank
Bhaskar Mitra
Principal Applied Scientist, Microsoft
@UnderdogGeek
2. Reading material
An Introduction to
Neural Information Retrieval
Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval
(December 2018)
Download PDF: http://bit.ly/fntir-neural
8. Neural networks
Chains of parameterized linear transforms (e.g., multiply weight, add
bias) followed by non-linear functions (σ)
Popular choices for σ:
Parameters trained using backpropagation
E2E training over millions of samples in batched mode
Many choices of architecture and hyper-parameters
Non-linearity
Input
Linear transform
Non-linearity
Linear transform
Predicted output
forwardpass
backwardpass
Expected output
loss
Tanh ReLU
11. The softmax function
In neural classification models, the softmax function is popularly used
to normalize the neural network output scores across all the classes
12. Cross entropy
The cross entropy between two
probability distributions 𝑝 and 𝑞
over a discrete set of events is
given by,
If 𝑝 𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑡 = 1and 𝑝𝑖 = 0 for all
other values of 𝑖 then,
13. Cross entropy with
softmax loss
Cross entropy with softmax is a popular loss
function for classification
14. We are given training data: < 𝑥, 𝑦 > pairs, where 𝑥 is input and 𝑦 is expected output
Step 1: Define model and randomly initialize learnable model parameters
Step 2: Given 𝑥, compute model output
Step 3: Given model output and 𝑦, compute loss 𝑙
Step 4: Compute gradient
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤
of loss 𝑙 w.r.t. each parameter 𝑤
Step 5: Update parameter as 𝑤 𝑛𝑒𝑤 = 𝑤 𝑜𝑙𝑑 − 𝜂 ×
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤
, where 𝜂 is learning rate
Step 6: Go back to step 2 and repeat till convergence
Gradient Descent
15. Goal: iteratively update the learnable parameters such that the loss 𝑙 is minimized
Compute the gradient of the loss 𝑙 w.r.t. each parameter (e.g., 𝑤1)
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤1
=
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑦2
×
𝜕𝑦2
𝜕𝑦1
×
𝜕𝑦1
𝜕𝑤1
Update the parameter value based on the gradient with 𝜂 as the learning rate
𝑤1
𝑛𝑒𝑤
= 𝑤1
𝑜𝑙𝑑
− 𝜂 ×
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤1
Gradient Descent
Task: regression
Training data: 𝑥, 𝑦 pairs
Model: NN (1 feature, 1 hidden layer, 1 hidden node)
Learnable parameters: 𝑤1, 𝑏1, 𝑤2, 𝑏2
𝑥 𝑦1 𝑦2
𝑙
𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤1. 𝑥 + 𝑏1
𝑦 − 𝑦2
2
𝑦
𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤2. 𝑦1 + 𝑏2
…and repeat
16. Goal: iteratively update the learnable parameters such that the loss 𝑙 is minimized
Compute the gradient of the loss 𝑙 w.r.t. each parameter (e.g., 𝑤1)
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤1
=
𝜕 𝑦 − 𝑦2
2
𝜕𝑦2
×
𝜕𝑦2
𝜕𝑦1
×
𝜕𝑦1
𝜕𝑤1
Update the parameter value based on the gradient with 𝜂 as the learning rate
𝑤1
𝑛𝑒𝑤
= 𝑤1
𝑜𝑙𝑑
− 𝜂 ×
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤1
Gradient Descent
Task: regression
Training data: 𝑥, 𝑦 pairs
Model: NN (1 feature, 1 hidden layer, 1 hidden node)
Learnable parameters: 𝑤1, 𝑏1, 𝑤2, 𝑏2
𝑥 𝑦1 𝑦2
𝑙
𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤1. 𝑥 + 𝑏1
𝑦 − 𝑦2
2
𝑦
𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤2. 𝑦1 + 𝑏2
…and repeat
17. Goal: iteratively update the learnable parameters such that the loss 𝑙 is minimized
Compute the gradient of the loss 𝑙 w.r.t. each parameter (e.g., 𝑤1)
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤1
= −2 × 𝑦 − 𝑦2 ×
𝜕𝑦2
𝜕𝑦1
×
𝜕𝑦1
𝜕𝑤1
Update the parameter value based on the gradient with 𝜂 as the learning rate
𝑤1
𝑛𝑒𝑤
= 𝑤1
𝑜𝑙𝑑
− 𝜂 ×
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤1
Gradient Descent
Task: regression
Training data: 𝑥, 𝑦 pairs
Model: NN (1 feature, 1 hidden layer, 1 hidden node)
Learnable parameters: 𝑤1, 𝑏1, 𝑤2, 𝑏2
𝑥 𝑦1 𝑦2
𝑙
𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤1. 𝑥 + 𝑏1
𝑦 − 𝑦2
2
𝑦
𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤2. 𝑦1 + 𝑏2
…and repeat
18. Goal: iteratively update the learnable parameters such that the loss 𝑙 is minimized
Compute the gradient of the loss 𝑙 w.r.t. each parameter (e.g., 𝑤1)
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤1
= −2 × 𝑦 − 𝑦2 ×
𝜕𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤2. 𝑦1 + 𝑏2
𝜕𝑦1
×
𝜕𝑦1
𝜕𝑤1
Update the parameter value based on the gradient with 𝜂 as the learning rate
𝑤1
𝑛𝑒𝑤
= 𝑤1
𝑜𝑙𝑑
− 𝜂 ×
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤1
Gradient Descent
Task: regression
Training data: 𝑥, 𝑦 pairs
Model: NN (1 feature, 1 hidden layer, 1 hidden node)
Learnable parameters: 𝑤1, 𝑏1, 𝑤2, 𝑏2
𝑥 𝑦1 𝑦2
𝑙
𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤1. 𝑥 + 𝑏1
𝑦 − 𝑦2
2
𝑦
𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤2. 𝑦1 + 𝑏2
…and repeat
19. Goal: iteratively update the learnable parameters such that the loss 𝑙 is minimized
Compute the gradient of the loss 𝑙 w.r.t. each parameter (e.g., 𝑤1)
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤1
= −2 × 𝑦 − 𝑦2 × 1 − 𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ2
𝑤2. 𝑥 + 𝑏2 × 𝑤2 ×
𝜕𝑦1
𝜕𝑤1
Update the parameter value based on the gradient with 𝜂 as the learning rate
𝑤1
𝑛𝑒𝑤
= 𝑤1
𝑜𝑙𝑑
− 𝜂 ×
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤1
Gradient Descent
Task: regression
Training data: 𝑥, 𝑦 pairs
Model: NN (1 feature, 1 hidden layer, 1 hidden node)
Learnable parameters: 𝑤1, 𝑏1, 𝑤2, 𝑏2
𝑥 𝑦1 𝑦2
𝑙
𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤1. 𝑥 + 𝑏1
𝑦 − 𝑦2
2
𝑦
𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤2. 𝑦1 + 𝑏2
…and repeat
20. Goal: iteratively update the learnable parameters such that the loss 𝑙 is minimized
Compute the gradient of the loss 𝑙 w.r.t. each parameter (e.g., 𝑤1)
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤1
= −2 × 𝑦 − 𝑦2 × 1 − 𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ2
𝑤2. 𝑥 + 𝑏2 × 𝑤2 ×
𝜕𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤1. 𝑥 + 𝑏1
𝜕𝑤1
Update the parameter value based on the gradient with 𝜂 as the learning rate
𝑤1
𝑛𝑒𝑤
= 𝑤1
𝑜𝑙𝑑
− 𝜂 ×
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤1
Gradient Descent
Task: regression
Training data: 𝑥, 𝑦 pairs
Model: NN (1 feature, 1 hidden layer, 1 hidden node)
Learnable parameters: 𝑤1, 𝑏1, 𝑤2, 𝑏2
𝑥 𝑦1 𝑦2
𝑙
𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤1. 𝑥 + 𝑏1
𝑦 − 𝑦2
2
𝑦
𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤2. 𝑦1 + 𝑏2
…and repeat
21. Goal: iteratively update the learnable parameters such that the loss 𝑙 is minimized
Compute the gradient of the loss 𝑙 w.r.t. each parameter (e.g., 𝑤1)
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤1
= −2 × 𝑦 − 𝑦2 × 1 − 𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ2
𝑤2. 𝑥 + 𝑏2 × 𝑤2 × 1 − 𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ2
𝑤1. 𝑥 + 𝑏1 × 𝑥
Update the parameter value based on the gradient with 𝜂 as the learning rate
𝑤1
𝑛𝑒𝑤
= 𝑤1
𝑜𝑙𝑑
− 𝜂 ×
𝜕𝑙
𝜕𝑤1
Gradient Descent
Task: regression
Training data: 𝑥, 𝑦 pairs
Model: NN (1 feature, 1 hidden layer, 1 hidden node)
Learnable parameters: 𝑤1, 𝑏1, 𝑤2, 𝑏2
𝑥 𝑦1 𝑦2
𝑙
𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤1. 𝑥 + 𝑏1
𝑦 − 𝑦2
2
𝑦
𝑡𝑎𝑛ℎ 𝑤2. 𝑦1 + 𝑏2
…and repeat
22. Exercise
Simple Neural Network from Scratch
Implement a simple multi-layer neural network
with single input feature, single output, and
single neuron per layer using (i) PyTorch and
(ii) from scratch—and demonstrate that both
approaches produce identical outcome.
https://github.com/spacemanidol/AFIRMDeep
Learning2020/blob/master/NNPrimer.ipynb
23. Computation
Networks
The “Lego” approach to specifying neural architectures
Library of neural layers, each layer defines logic for:
1. Forward pass: compute layer output given layer input
2. Backward pass:
a) compute gradient of layer output w.r.t. layer inputs
b) compute gradient of layer output w.r.t. layer parameters (if any)
Chain nodes to create bigger and more complex networks
27. Learning to Rank (LTR)
”... the task to automatically construct a
ranking model using training data, such
that the model can sort new objects
according to their degrees of relevance,
preference, or importance.”
- Liu [2009]
Tie-Yan Liu. Learning to rank for information retrieval. Foundation and Trends in Information Retrieval, 2009.
Image source: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/45530.pdf
28. Problem formulation
LTR models represent a rankable item—e.g., a document or a movie or a
song—given some context—e.g., a user-issued query or user’s historical
interactions with other items—as a numerical vector 𝑥 ∈ ℝ 𝑛
The ranking model 𝑓: 𝑥 → ℝ is trained to map the vector to a real-valued
score such that relevant items are scored higher.
29. Why is ranking challenging?
Examples of ranking
metrics
Discounted Cumulative Gain (DCG)
𝐷𝐶𝐺@𝑘 =
𝑖=1
𝑘
2 𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖
− 1
𝑙𝑜𝑔2 𝑖 + 1
Reciprocal Rank (RR)
𝑅𝑅@𝑘 = max
1<𝑖<𝑘
𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖
𝑖
Rank based metrics, such as DCG and MRR, are non-smooth / non-differentiable
30. Features
They can often be categorized as:
Query-independent or static features
e.g., incoming link count and document length
Query-dependent or dynamic features
e.g., BM25
Query-level features
e.g., query length
Traditional L2R models employ
hand-crafted features that
encode IR insights
31. Features
Tao Qin, Tie-Yan Liu, Jun Xu, and Hang Li. LETOR: A Benchmark Collection for Research on Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval, Information Retrieval Journal, 2010
32. Approaches
Pointwise approach
Relevance label 𝑦 𝑞,𝑑 is a number—derived from binary or graded human
judgments or implicit user feedback (e.g., CTR). Typically, a regression or
classification model is trained to predict 𝑦 𝑞,𝑑 given 𝑥 𝑞,𝑑.
Pairwise approach
Pairwise preference between documents for a query (𝑑𝑖 ≻ 𝑑𝑗 w.r.t. 𝑞) as
label. Reduces to binary classification to predict more relevant document.
Listwise approach
Directly optimize for rank-based metric, such as NDCG—difficult because
these metrics are often not differentiable w.r.t. model parameters.
Liu [2009] categorizes
different LTR approaches
based on training objectives:
Tie-Yan Liu. Learning to rank for information retrieval. Foundation and Trends in Information Retrieval, 2009.
33. Pointwise objectives
Regression loss
Given 𝑞, 𝑑 predict the value of 𝑦 𝑞,𝑑
e.g., square loss for binary or categorical
labels,
where, 𝑦 𝑞,𝑑 is the one-hot representation
[Fuhr, 1989] or the actual value [Cossock and
Zhang, 2006] of the label
Norbert Fuhr. Optimum polynomial retrieval functions based on the probability ranking principle. ACM TOIS, 1989.
David Cossock and Tong Zhang. Subset ranking using regression. In COLT, 2006.
labels
prediction
0 1 1
34. Pointwise objectives
Classification loss
Given 𝑞, 𝑑 predict the class 𝑦 𝑞,𝑑
e.g., cross-entropy with softmax over
categorical labels 𝑌 [Li et al., 2008],
where, 𝑠 𝑦 𝑞,𝑑
is the model’s score for label 𝑦 𝑞,𝑑
labels
prediction
0 1
Ping Li, Qiang Wu, and Christopher J Burges. Mcrank: Learning to rank using multiple classification and gradient boosting. In NIPS, 2008.
35. Pairwise objectives Pairwise loss generally has the following form [Chen et al., 2009],
where, 𝜙 can be,
• Hinge function 𝜙 𝑧 = 𝑚𝑎𝑥 0, 1 − 𝑧 [Herbrich et al., 2000]
• Exponential function 𝜙 𝑧 = 𝑒−𝑧
[Freund et al., 2003]
• Logistic function 𝜙 𝑧 = 𝑙𝑜𝑔 1 + 𝑒−𝑧
[Burges et al., 2005]
• Others…
Pairwise loss minimizes the average number of
inversions in ranking—i.e., 𝑑𝑖 ≻ 𝑑𝑗 w.r.t. 𝑞 but 𝑑𝑗 is
ranked higher than 𝑑𝑖
Given 𝑞, 𝑑𝑖, 𝑑𝑗 , predict the more relevant document
For 𝑞, 𝑑𝑖 and 𝑞, 𝑑𝑗 ,
Feature vectors: 𝑥𝑖 and 𝑥𝑗
Model scores: 𝑠𝑖 = 𝑓 𝑥𝑖 and 𝑠𝑗 = 𝑓 𝑥𝑗
Wei Chen, Tie-Yan Liu, Yanyan Lan, Zhi-Ming Ma, and Hang Li. Ranking measures and loss functions in learning to rank. In NIPS, 2009.
Ralf Herbrich, Thore Graepel, and Klaus Obermayer. Large margin rank boundaries for ordinal regression. 2000.
Yoav Freund, Raj Iyer, Robert E Schapire, and Yoram Singer. An efficient boosting algorithm for combining preferences. In JMLR, 2003.
Chris Burges, Tal Shaked, Erin Renshaw, Ari Lazier, Matt Deeds, Nicole Hamilton, and Greg Hullender. Learning to rank using gradient descent. In ICML, 2005.
36. Pairwise objectives
RankNet loss
Pairwise loss function proposed by Burges et al. [2005]—an industry favourite
[Burges, 2015]
Predicted probabilities: 𝑝𝑖𝑗 = 𝑝 𝑠𝑖 > 𝑠𝑗 ≡
𝑒 𝛾.𝑠 𝑖
𝑒 𝛾.𝑠 𝑖 +𝑒
𝛾.𝑠 𝑗
=
1
1+𝑒
−𝛾. 𝑠 𝑖−𝑠 𝑗
Desired probabilities: 𝑝𝑖𝑗 = 1 and 𝑝𝑗𝑖 = 0
Computing cross-entropy between 𝑝 and 𝑝
ℒ 𝑅𝑎𝑛𝑘𝑁𝑒𝑡 = − 𝑝𝑖𝑗. 𝑙𝑜𝑔 𝑝𝑖𝑗 − 𝑝𝑗𝑖. 𝑙𝑜𝑔 𝑝𝑗𝑖 = −𝑙𝑜𝑔 𝑝𝑖𝑗 = 𝑙𝑜𝑔 1 + 𝑒−𝛾. 𝑠 𝑖−𝑠 𝑗
pairwise
preference
score
0 1
Chris Burges, Tal Shaked, Erin Renshaw, Ari Lazier, Matt Deeds, Nicole Hamilton, and Greg Hullender. Learning to rank using gradient descent. In ICML, 2005.
Chris Burges. RankNet: A ranking retrospective. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/ranknet-a-ranking-retrospective/. 2015.
37. A generalized cross-entropy loss
An alternative loss function assumes a single relevant document 𝑑+ and compares it
against the full collection 𝐷
Predicted probabilities: p 𝑑+|𝑞 =
𝑒 𝛾.𝑠 𝑞,𝑑+
𝑑∈𝐷 𝑒 𝛾.𝑠 𝑞,𝑑
The cross-entropy loss is then given by,
ℒ 𝐶𝐸 𝑞, 𝑑+, 𝐷 = −𝑙𝑜𝑔 p 𝑑+|𝑞 = −𝑙𝑜𝑔
𝑒 𝛾.𝑠 𝑞,𝑑+
𝑑∈𝐷 𝑒 𝛾.𝑠 𝑞,𝑑
Computing the softmax over the full collection is prohibitively expensive—LTR models
typically consider few negative candidates [Huang et al., 2013, Shen et al., 2014, Mitra et al., 2017]
Po-Sen Huang, Xiaodong He, Jianfeng Gao, Li Deng, Alex Acero, and Larry Heck. Learning deep structured semantic models for web search using clickthrough data. In CIKM, 2013.
Yelong Shen, Xiaodong He, Jianfeng Gao, Li Deng, and Gregoire Mesnil. A latent semantic model with convolutional-pooling structure for information retrieval. In CIKM, 2014.
Bhaskar Mitra, Fernando Diaz, and Nick Craswell. Learning to match using local and distributed representations of text for web search. In WWW, 2017.
38. Blue: relevant Gray: non-relevant
NDCG and ERR higher for left but pairwise
errors less for right
Due to strong position-based discounting in
IR measures, errors at higher ranks are much
more problematic than at lower ranks
But listwise metrics are non-continuous and
non-differentiable
LISTWISE
OBJECTIVES
Christopher JC Burges. From ranknet to lambdarank to lambdamart: An overview. Learning, 2010.
[Burges, 2010]
39. Listwise objectives
Burges et al. [2006] make two observations:
1. To train a model we don’t need the costs
themselves, only the gradients (of the costs
w.r.t model scores)
2. It is desired that the gradient be bigger for
pairs of documents that produces a bigger
impact in NDCG by swapping positions
Christopher JC Burges, Robert Ragno, and Quoc Viet Le. Learning to rank with nonsmooth cost functions. In NIPS, 2006.
LambdaRank loss
Multiply actual gradients with the change in
NDCG by swapping the rank positions of the
two documents
40. Listwise objectives
Mingrui Wu, Yi Chang, Zhaohui Zheng, and Hongyuan Zha. Smoothing DCG for learning to rank: A novel approach using smoothed hinge functions. In CIKM, 2009.
Smooth DCG
Wu et al. [2009] compute a “smooth” rank of
documents as a function of their scores
This “smooth” rank can be plugged into a
ranking metric, such as MRR or DCG, to
produce a smooth ranking loss
41. Listwise objectives
According to the Luce model [Luce, 2005],
given four items 𝑑1, 𝑑2, 𝑑3, 𝑑4 the probability
of observing a particular rank-order, say
𝑑2, 𝑑1, 𝑑4, 𝑑3 , is given by:
where, 𝜋 is a particular permutation and 𝜙 is a
transformation (e.g., linear, exponential, or
sigmoid) over the score 𝑠𝑖 corresponding to
item 𝑑𝑖
R Duncan Luce. Individual choice behavior. 1959.
Zhe Cao, Tao Qin, Tie-Yan Liu, Ming-Feng Tsai, and Hang Li. Learning to rank: from pairwise approach to listwise approach. In ICML, 2007.
Fen Xia, Tie-Yan Liu, Jue Wang, Wensheng Zhang, and Hang Li. Listwise approach to learning to rank: theory and algorithm. In ICML, 2008.
ListNet loss
Cao et al. [2007] propose to compute the
probability distribution over all possible
permutations based on model score and ground-
truth labels. The loss is then given by the K-L
divergence between these two distributions.
This is computationally very costly, computing
permutations of only the top-K items makes it
slightly less prohibitive.
ListMLE loss
Xia et al. [2008] propose to compute the
probability of the ideal permutation based on the
ground truth. However, with categorical labels
more than one permutation is possible.
43. We will host the 3rd edition of the Deep Learning track at TREC 2021; please consider participating!
44. Getting started
Designed to be easy-to-use for
anyone new or experienced with the
TREC Deep Learning track
Can be trained from scratch (incl.
word embeddings) under 1.5 days
using 4x Tesla P100 GPUs (no
pretraining)
Can serve as a baseline for both
rerank and fullrank settings
45. Get started
with Deep
Learning
for Search
Book
Tutorial
Data
Code
PublicresourcesforneuralIRresearch (http://bit.ly/fntir-neural)
(http://bit.ly/deeplearning4search-fire2019)
(http://www.msmarco.org and
https://bit.ly/TREC-DL-2020)
(https://bit.ly/TREC-DL-Quick-Start)