arXiv:2604.15101cs.IRcs.LG2026-04被引 1

提出一种不依赖特定评估指标的排序学习新方法,提升排序模型通用性与训练效率。

Metric-agnostic Learning-to-Rank via Boosting and Rank Approximation

  • 用平滑近似替代不可导排序操作,构建可微分损失函数
  • 基于梯度提升机优化每组文档的排序,显著提升跨指标表现
  • 适用于需要泛化到多种评估指标的场景,如推荐系统、搜索排序

学习排序(Learning-to-Rank, LTR)是一种监督学习方法,旨在根据查询或上下文对文档进行相关性排序。尽管在信息检索系统中取得显著成功,现有LTR方法通常依赖单一排序指标(如NDCG或MAP)来优化目标函数,这带来两个问题:(1) 不可导性:直接在排序指标上优化本质非光滑,导致训练不稳定且低效;(2) 排序能力受限:仅针对单一指标优化,难以泛化至其他关注指标。为此,本文提出一种新的列表级LTR框架,实现高效且通用的排序。具体地,设计了一种结合排序算子平滑近似与每查询平均平方损失的可微分损失函数;将梯度提升机引入该损失的最小化过程,针对每列表进行优化,为首次贡献;大量实验表明,该方法在主流信息检索指标上优于当前最优方法,同时保持相近效率。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Learning-to-Rank (LTR) is a supervised machine learning approach that constructs models specifically designed to order a set of items or documents based on their relevance or importance to a given query or context. Despite significant success in real-world information retrieval systems, current LTR methods rely on one prefix ranking metric (e.g., such as Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) or Mean Average Precision (MAP)) for optimizing the ranking objective function. Such metric-dependent setting limits LTR methods from two perspectives: (1) non-differentiable problem: directly optimizing ranking functions over a given ranking metric is inherently non-smooth, making the training process unstable and inefficient; (2) limited ranking utility: optimizing over one single metric makes it difficult to generalize well to other ranking metrics of interest. To address the above issues, we propose a novel listwise LTR framework for efficient and generalizable ranking purpose. Specifically, we propose a new differentiable ranking loss that combines a smooth approximation to the ranking operator with the average mean square loss per query. Then, we adapt gradient-boosting machines to minimize our proposed loss with respect to each list, a novel contribution. Finally, extensive experimental results confirm that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art in information retrieval measures with similar efficiency.

学习排序可微分排序梯度提升

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。