Neural Learning to Rank
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The document provides an overview of neural networks and learning to rank (LTR) methodologies in information retrieval. It discusses various approaches to LTR including pointwise, pairwise, and listwise strategies, along with metrics for evaluation such as discounted cumulative gain (DCG) and reciprocal rank (RR). Additionally, it explains the importance of loss functions and training processes in optimizing ranking models to assign higher scores to relevant items.
![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](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ltr-200410152536/85/Neural-Learning-to-Rank-5-320.jpg){kind=icon}
![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.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ltr-200410152536/85/Neural-Learning-to-Rank-37-320.jpg){kind=icon}
![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](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ltr-200410152536/85/Neural-Learning-to-Rank-38-320.jpg){kind=icon}
![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.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ltr-200410152536/85/Neural-Learning-to-Rank-39-320.jpg){kind=icon}
![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.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ltr-200410152536/85/Neural-Learning-to-Rank-40-320.jpg){kind=icon}
![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.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ltr-200410152536/85/Neural-Learning-to-Rank-41-320.jpg){kind=icon}
![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.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ltr-200410152536/85/Neural-Learning-to-Rank-42-320.jpg){kind=icon}
![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]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ltr-200410152536/85/Neural-Learning-to-Rank-43-320.jpg){kind=icon}
![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](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ltr-200410152536/85/Neural-Learning-to-Rank-44-320.jpg){kind=icon}
![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.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ltr-200410152536/85/Neural-Learning-to-Rank-45-320.jpg){kind=icon}
![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](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ltr-200410152536/85/Neural-Learning-to-Rank-46-320.jpg){kind=icon}
Neural Learning to Rank
- 1. Neural Learning to Rank Bhaskar Mitra Principal Applied Scientist, Microsoft PhD candidate, University College London @UnderdogGeek
- 2. Topics A quick recap of neural networks The fundamentals of learning to rank
- 3. Reading material An Introduction to Neural Information Retrieval Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval (December 2018) Download PDF: http://bit.ly/fntir-neural
- 4. Most information retrieval (IR) systems present a ranked list of retrieved artifacts
- 5. 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
- 7. A quick recap of neural networks
- 8. Vectors, matrices, and tensors Image source: https://dev.to/mmithrakumar/scalars-vectors-matrices-and-tensors-with-tensorflow-2-0-1f66 Image source: https://hadrienj.github.io/posts/Deep-Learning-Book-Series-2.1-Scalars-Vectors-Matrices-and-Tensors/ matrix transpose matrix addition dot product matrix multiplication
- 10. Supervised learning Image source: https://www.intechopen.com/books/artificial-neural-networks-architectures-and-applications/applying-artificial-neural-network-hadron-hadron-collisions-at-lhc
- 11. 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
- 13. Squared loss The squared loss is a popular loss function for regression tasks
- 14. The softmax function In neural classification models, the softmax function is popularly used to normalize the neural network output scores across all the classes
- 15. 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,
- 16. Cross entropy with softmax loss Cross entropy with softmax is a popular loss function for classification
- 17. 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
- 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 = 𝜕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
- 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 = 𝜕 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
- 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 × 𝜕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
- 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 × 𝜕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
- 22. 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
- 23. 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
- 24. 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
- 25. 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
- 26. 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. Why adding depth helps http://playground.tensorflow.org
- 29. Bias-variance trade-off in the deep learning era Mikhail Belkin, Daniel Hsu, Siyuan Ma, and Soumik Mandal. Reconciling modern machine-learning practice and the classical bias–variance trade-off. In PNAS, 2019.
- 30. Jonathan Frankle and Michael Carbin. The lottery ticket hypothesis: Finding sparse, trainable neural networks. In ICLR, 2019. Vivek Ramanujan, Mitchell Wortsman, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Ali Farhadi, and Mohammad Rastegari. What's Hidden in a Randomly Weighted Neural Network? In ArXiv, 2019. The lottery ticket hypothesis
- 31. Questions?
- 32. The fundamentals of learning to rank
- 33. 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.
- 34. 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
- 35. 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
- 36. 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
- 37. 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.
- 38. 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
- 39. 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.
- 40. 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.
- 41. 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.
- 42. 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.
- 43. 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]
- 44. 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
- 45. 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.
- 46. 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