Moumita Bhattacharya, Vito Ostuni, Sudarshan Lamkhede
Search and recommendation systems are essential in many services, and they are often developed separately, leading to complex maintenance and technical debt. In this paper, we present a unified deep learning model that efficiently handles key aspects of both tasks.
Aditya Sinha, Harald Steck, Vito Ostuni et al.
Users interacting with Large Language Models (LLMs) in a multi-turn conversation routinely refine their requests or pivot to new topics. LLMs, however, often miss these topic shifts and carry over irrelevant context from previous turns, leading to inaccurate responses. In this paper, we stress-test the multi-turn understanding of LLMs and study the following two sub-tasks: (1) detecting whether the user pivots or refines in the current turn, and (2) shortlisting relevant context from previous turns. To this end, we construct synthetic benchmarks based on real-world datasets from varied domains, as to simulate context shifts of different levels of difficulty. We then evaluate the zero-shot performance of ten LLMs (open-weight, closed-source and reasoning), and demonstrate that only some reasoning and strongly instructed LLMs are accurate in detecting pivots; open-weight LLMs struggle with the task and frequently carry stale context even with explicit cues; and all models suffer from a position bias. Based on the results, we discuss key takeaways for improving long-term robustness in multi-turn capabilities for LLMs.
Mucun Tian, Chun Guo, Vito Ostuni et al.
Learning-to-Rank (LTR) models trained from implicit feedback (e.g. clicks) suffer from inherent biases. A well-known one is the position bias -- documents in top positions are more likely to receive clicks due in part to their position advantages. To unbiasedly learn to rank, existing counterfactual frameworks first estimate the propensity (probability) of missing clicks with intervention data from a small portion of search traffic, and then use inverse propensity score (IPS) to debias LTR algorithms on the whole data set. These approaches often assume the propensity only depends on the position of the document, which may cause high estimation variance in applications where the search context (e.g. query, user) varies frequently. While context-dependent propensity models reduce variance, accurate estimations may require randomization or intervention on a large amount of traffic, which may not be realistic in real-world systems, especially for long tail queries. In this work, we employ heterogeneous treatment effect estimation techniques to estimate position bias when intervention click data is limited. We then use such estimations to debias the observed click distribution and re-draw a new de-biased data set, which can be used for any LTR algorithms. We conduct simulations with varying experiment conditions and show the effectiveness of the proposed method in regimes with long tail queries and sparse clicks.