Papers › Two-stage Risk Control with Application to Ranked Retrieval

Two-stage Risk Control with Application to Ranked Retrieval

27 Apr 2024arXiv:2404.17769archive 2025-07-28

Yunpeng Xu, Mufang Ying, Wenge Guo, Zhi Wei

Practical machine learning systems often operate in multiple sequential stages, as seen in ranking and recommendation systems, which typically include a retrieval phase followed by a ranking phase. Effectively assessing prediction uncertainty and ensuring effective risk control in such systems pose significant challenges due to their inherent complexity. To address these challenges, we developed two-stage risk control methods based on the recently proposed learn-then-test (LTT) and conformal risk control (CRC) frameworks. Unlike the methods in prior work that address multiple risks, our approach leverages the sequential nature of the problem, resulting in reduced computational burden. We provide theoretical guarantees for our proposed methods and design novel loss functions tailored for ranked retrieval tasks. The effectiveness of our approach is validated through experiments on two large-scale, widely-used datasets: MSLR-Web and Yahoo LTRC.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

git4review/conformal_ranked_retrieval officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Recommendation SystemsRetrieval

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

SET

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections