It is of increasing importance to develop learning methods for ranking. In contrast to many learning objectives, however, the ranking problem presents difficulties due to the fact that the space of permutations is not smooth. In this paper, we examine the class of rank-linear objective functions, which includes popular metrics such as precision and discounted cumulative gain. In particular, we observe that expectations of these gains are completely characterized by the marginals of the corresponding distribution over permutation matrices. Thus, the expectations of rank-linear objectives can always be described through locations in the Birkhoff polytope, i.e., doubly-stochastic matrices (DSMs). We propose a technique for learning DSM-based ranking functions using an iterative projection operator known as Sinkhorn normalization. Gradients of this operator can be computed via backpropagation, resulting in an algorithm we call Sinkhorn propagation, or SinkProp. This approach can be combined with a wide range of gradient-based approaches to rank learning. We demonstrate the utility of SinkProp on several information retrieval data sets.
builds on a rapidly expanding set of approaches to rank learning. Early learning-to-rank methods employed surrogate gain functions, as approximations to the target evaluation measure were necessary due to its aforementioned non-differentiability. More recently, methods have been developed to optimize expectation of the target evaluation measure, including SoftRank @cite_17 . BoltzRank @cite_14 and SmoothRank @cite_10 . These methods all attempt to maximize the expected gain of the ranking under any of the gain functions described above. The crucial component of each is the estimate of the distribution over rankings: SoftRank uses a rank-binomial approximation, which entails sampling and sorting ranks; BoltzRank uses a fixed set of sampled ranks; and SmoothRank uses a softmax on rankings based on a noisy model of scores. can be viewed as another method to optimize expected ranking gain, but the effect of the scaling is to concentrate the mass of the distribution over ranks on a small set, which peaks on the single chosen rank selected by the model at test time.
@cite_14 @cite_10 @cite_17
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A number of machine learning and computer vision problems, such as matrix completion and subspace clustering, require a matrix to be of low-rank. To meet this requirement, most existing methods use the nuclear norm as a convex proxy of the rank function and minimize it. However, the nuclear norm simply adds all nonzero singular values together instead of treating them equally as the rank function does, which may not be a good rank approximation when some singular values are very large. To reduce this undesirable weighting effect, we use a log-determinant function as a non-convex rank approximation which reduces the contributions of large singular values while keeping those of small singular values close to zero. We apply the method of augmented Lagrangian multipliers to optimize this non-convex rank approximation-based objective function and obtain closed-form solutions for all subproblems of minimizing different variables alternatively. The log-determinant low-rank optimization method is used to solve subspace clustering problem, for which we construct an affinity matrix based on the angular information of the low-rank representation to enhance its separability property. Extensive experimental results on face clustering and motion segmentation data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Learning to rank has become an important research topic in machine learning. While most learning-to-rank methods learn the ranking functions by minimizing loss functions, it is the ranking measures (such as NDCG and MAP) that are used to evaluate the performance of the learned ranking functions. In this work, we reveal the relationship between ranking measures and loss functions in learning-to-rank methods, such as Ranking SVM, RankBoost, RankNet, and ListMLE. We show that the loss functions of these methods are upper bounds of the measure-based ranking errors. As a result, the minimization of these loss functions will lead to the maximization of the ranking measures. The key to obtaining this result is to model ranking as a sequence of classification tasks, and define a so-called essential loss for ranking as the weighted sum of the classification errors of individual tasks in the sequence. We have proved that the essential loss is both an upper bound of the measure-based ranking errors, and a lower bound of the loss functions in the aforementioned methods. Our proof technique also suggests a way to modify existing loss functions to make them tighter bounds of the measure-based ranking errors. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that the modifications can lead to better ranking performances, demonstrating the correctness of our theoretical analysis. The paper is concerned with learning to rank, which is to construct a model or a function for ranking objects. Learning to rank is useful for document retrieval, collaborative filtering, and many other applications. Several methods for learning to rank have been proposed, which take object pairs as 'instances' in learning. We refer to them as the pairwise approach in this paper. Although the pairwise approach offers advantages, it ignores the fact that ranking is a prediction task on list of objects. The paper postulates that learning to rank should adopt the listwise approach in which lists of objects are used as 'instances' in learning. The paper proposes a new probabilistic method for the approach. Specifically it introduces two probability models, respectively referred to as permutation probability and top k probability, to define a listwise loss function for learning. Neural Network and Gradient Descent are then employed as model and algorithm in the learning method. Experimental results on information retrieval show that the proposed listwise approach performs better than the pairwise approach. Ranking a set of retrieved documents according to their relevance to a query is a popular problem in information retrieval. Methods that learn ranking functions are difficult to optimize, as ranking performance is typically judged by metrics that are not smooth. In this paper we propose a new listwise approach to learning to rank. Our method creates a conditional probability distribution over rankings assigned to documents for a given query, which permits gradient ascent optimization of the expected value of some performance measure. The rank probabilities take the form of a Boltzmann distribution, based on an energy function that depends on a scoring function composed of individual and pairwise potentials. Including pairwise potentials is a novel contribution, allowing the model to encode regularities in the relative scores of documents; existing models assign scores at test time based only on individual documents, with no pairwise constraints between documents. Experimental results on the LETOR3.0 data set show that our method out-performs existing learning approaches to ranking.