论文标题
概率置换图形搜索:对排名公平性的黑框优化
Probabilistic Permutation Graph Search: Black-Box Optimization for Fairness in Ranking
论文作者
论文摘要
基于不同的基本假设和观点,有几种公平性的措施。使用增强算法的PL优化可用于优化对排列的黑盒目标函数。特别是,它可用于优化公平措施。但是,尽管对重复次数中等数量的查询有效,但PL优化尚有改进的余地,可用于查询少数重复会话。 在本文中,我们基于置换图的概念提出了一种新颖的表示置换分布的方式。与PL相似,我们的分布表示为PPG,可用于公平的黑盒优化。与PL不同的是,在PPG成对反转概率中,将点型逻辑用作分布参数,以及参考排列构造分布。因此,可以将参考置换设置为目标函数的最佳采样排列,使PPG适合确定性和随机排名。我们的实验表明,PPG虽然与PL相当于较大的会话重复(即随机排名),却改进了PL,以优化一个会话(即确定性排名)的查询公平度量标准。此外,当有准确的公用事业估算可用时,例如,在表格模型中,与从学习到等级模型的质量较低的质量估计相比,PPG在公平性优化方面的性能会显着增强,从而导致PL的较大性能差距。最后,成对的概率使得可以施加成对约束,例如“项目$ d_1 $的排名始终高于项目$ d_2 $”。这样的约束可以同时优化公平度量标准并控制另一个目标,例如排名绩效。
There are several measures for fairness in ranking, based on different underlying assumptions and perspectives. PL optimization with the REINFORCE algorithm can be used for optimizing black-box objective functions over permutations. In particular, it can be used for optimizing fairness measures. However, though effective for queries with a moderate number of repeating sessions, PL optimization has room for improvement for queries with a small number of repeating sessions. In this paper, we present a novel way of representing permutation distributions, based on the notion of permutation graphs. Similar to PL, our distribution representation, called PPG, can be used for black-box optimization of fairness. Different from PL, where pointwise logits are used as the distribution parameters, in PPG pairwise inversion probabilities together with a reference permutation construct the distribution. As such, the reference permutation can be set to the best sampled permutation regarding the objective function, making PPG suitable for both deterministic and stochastic rankings. Our experiments show that PPG, while comparable to PL for larger session repetitions (i.e., stochastic ranking), improves over PL for optimizing fairness metrics for queries with one session (i.e., deterministic ranking). Additionally, when accurate utility estimations are available, e.g., in tabular models, the performance of PPG in fairness optimization is significantly boosted compared to lower quality utility estimations from a learning to rank model, leading to a large performance gap with PL. Finally, the pairwise probabilities make it possible to impose pairwise constraints such as "item $d_1$ should always be ranked higher than item $d_2$." Such constraints can be used to simultaneously optimize the fairness metric and control another objective such as ranking performance.