Variance reduction in gradient exploration for online learning to rank

Online Learning to Rank (OL2R) algorithms learn from implicit user feedback on the fly. The key to such algorithms is an unbiased estimate of gradients, which is often (trivially) achieved by uniformly sampling from the entire parameter space. Unfortunately, this leads to high-variance in gradient estimation, resulting in high regret during model updates, especially when the dimension of the parameter space is large. In this work, we aim at reducing the variance of gradient estimation in OL2R algorithms. We project the selected updating direction (i.e., the winning direction) into a space spanned by the feature vectors from examined documents under the current query (termed the “document space” for short), after an interleaved test. Our key insight is that the result of an interleaved test is solely governed by a user's relevance evaluation over the examined documents. Hence, the true gradient introduced by this test is only reflected in the constructed document space, and components of the proposed gradient which are orthogonal to the document space can be safely removed, for variance reduction purpose. We prove that this projected gradient is still an unbiased estimation of the true gradient, and show that this lower-variance gradient estimation results in significant regret reduction. Our proposed method is compatible with all existing OL2R algorithms which rank documents using a linear model. Extensive experimental comparisons with several state-of-the-art OL2R algorithms have confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed method in reducing the variance of gradient estimation and improving overall ranking performance.