Tootfinder

Ranking NFL's 13 new coach-QB duos, plus top Defensive Rookie of the Year candidates for 2025 season

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/ranking

Dallas Cowboys starter gets shocking top 20 NFL ranking among peers https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-starter-gets-shocking-top-20-nfl-ranking-among-peers

Ranking top five games on 2025 NFL preseason schedule: Browns are must-see TV, Jets-Giants makes list

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/ranking

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09492 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_…

Learning Cascade Ranking as One Network
Cascade Ranking is a prevalent architecture in large-scale top-k selection systems like recommendation and advertising platforms. Traditional training methods focus on single-stage optimization, neglecting interactions between stages. Recent advances have introduced interaction-aware training paradigms, but still struggle to 1) align training objectives with the goal of the entire cascade ranking (i.e., end-to-end recall of ground-truth items) and 2) learn effective collaboration patterns for d…

New NFL contenders? Ranking 18 teams' playoff chances after missing postseason https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/new-nfl-contenders-ranking-18-teams-playoff-chances-after-missing-postseason

Ranking new QB-WR duos for 2025 NFL season: Steelers' new Aaron Rodgers-DK Metcalf tandem tops in AFC

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/ranking…

Yes!
https://bsky.app/profile/repjasmine.bsky.social/post/3lqpvhi537k2o

Yes!
https://bsky.app/profile/repjasmine.bsky.social/post/3lqpvhi537k2o

Ranking every NFL offensive line: Kyle Long sorts all 32 blocking units by tiers; Bills, Eagles among elite

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/ra…

New NFL contenders? Ranking 18 teams' playoff chances after missing postseason https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/new-nfl-contenders-ranking-18-teams-playoff-chances-after-missing-postseason

Ranking NFL's 13 new coach-quarterback duos of 2025: Where do Steelers rank with Aaron Rodgers? Cowboys No. 1?

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17836 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_sta…

Robust Distributed Estimation: Extending Gossip Algorithms to Ranking and Trimmed Means
This paper addresses the problem of robust estimation in gossip algorithms over arbitrary communication graphs. Gossip algorithms are fully decentralized, relying only on local neighbor-to-neighbor communication, making them well-suited for situations where communication is constrained. A fundamental challenge in existing mean-based gossip algorithms is their vulnerability to malicious or corrupted nodes. In this paper, we show that an outlier-robust mean can be computed by globally estimating …

K-order Ranking Preference Optimization for Large Language Models
Shihao Cai, Chongming Gao, Yang Zhang, Wentao Shi, Jizhi Zhang, Keqin Bao, Qifan Wang, Fuli Feng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00441

K-order Ranking Preference Optimization for Large Language Models
To adapt large language models (LLMs) to ranking tasks, existing list-wise methods, represented by list-wise Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), focus on optimizing partial-order or full-order list ranking consistency for LLMs to enhance their ranking abilities. However, we argue that optimizing top-K ranking consistency could be more appropriate for real-world applications. There are two main reasons: (1) users are typically concerned with only the top-K results, making top-K ranking more im…

A Ranking Framework for Network Resource Allocation and Scheduling via Hypergraphs
Rajpreet Singh, Novak Bo\v{s}kov, Aditya Gudal, Manzoor A. Khan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01571

A Ranking Framework for Network Resource Allocation and Scheduling via Hypergraphs
Resource allocation and scheduling are a common problem in various distributed systems. Although widely studied, the state-of-the-art solutions either do not scale or lack the expressive power to capture the most complex instances of the problem. To that end, we present a mathematical framework for hypergraph ranking and analysis, unifying graph theory, lattice theory, and semantic analysis. In our fundamental theorem, we prove the existence of partial order on entities of hypergraphs, extendin…

These six teams have never had a player win NFL MVP: Ranking their chances of ending the drought in 2025

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/these-…

Worst to first for 49ers? Ranking 8 last-place teams’ chances to win division in 2025 https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/worst-first-49ers-ranking-8-last-place-teams-chances-win-division-2025

Adaptive Exploration in Lenia with Intrinsic Multi-Objective Ranking
Niko Lorantos, Lee Spector
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02990 https://

Adaptive Exploration in Lenia with Intrinsic Multi-Objective Ranking
Artificial life aims to understand the fundamental principles of biological life by creating computational models that exhibit life-like properties. Although artificial life systems show promise for simulating biological evolution, achieving open-endedness remains a central challenge. This work investigates mechanisms to promote exploration and unbounded innovation within evolving populations of Lenia continuous cellular automata by evaluating individuals against each other with respect to dist…

Modern search demands scalable personalisation. Join Piotr Kobziakowski
at this year's Berlin Buzzwords to discover how Vespa's multi-stage ranking and tensor framework can be used for hybrid queries, multimodal retrieval, and real-time machine learning. Learn how to deploy low-latency, high-relevance search systems at petabyte scale.
Learn more:

Vespa.ai’s Personalized Search: Advanced Ranking & Tensor framework
Today’s applications require search engines to unify text, vectors, and business logic with millisecond latency at petabyte scale. It’s not easy to balance speed, relevance, and personalization for a large user population and a billion scale item base. Vespa.ai, the open-source engine powering Yahoo, Perplexity, Qwant, Vinted, Spotify addresses this through multi-stage ranking with close to data tensor operations and easy to understand custom functions. Vespa’s phased architecture enables…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.07514 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eco…

Estimating Sequential Search Models Based on a Partial Ranking Representation
The rapid growth of online shopping has made consumer search data increasingly available, opening up new possibilities for empirical research. Sequential search models offer a structured approach for analyzing such data, but their estimation remains difficult. This is because consumers make optimal decisions based on private information revealed in search, which is not observed in typical data. As a result, the model's likelihood function involves high-dimensional integrals that require intensi…

Quantifying Query Fairness Under Unawareness
Thomas Jaenich, Alejandro Moreo, Alessandro Fabris, Graham McDonald, Andrea Esuli, Iadh Ounis, Fabrizio Sebastiani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04140

Quantifying Query Fairness Under Unawareness
Traditional ranking algorithms are designed to retrieve the most relevant items for a user's query, but they often inherit biases from data that can unfairly disadvantage vulnerable groups. Fairness in information access systems (IAS) is typically assessed by comparing the distribution of groups in a ranking to a target distribution, such as the overall group distribution in the dataset. These fairness metrics depend on knowing the true group labels for each item. However, when groups are defin…

Ranking best bets for NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year: Longshot gets nod over Travis Hunter at No. 1

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/ranking

Pope Leo tells the Giro he is going to ride stage next year and will win!
#giroditalia2025

For Trump,
“it’s no billionaire left behind
— and good luck to everyone else.”
“It’s telling that President Trump has chosen to release his budget on a Friday night with no fanfare whatsoever,”
said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee,
following the administration’s release of approximately 1,200 pages of budget documents.
“That’s probably because his budget would raise costs for working people,
destroy basic s…

'No Billionaire Left Behind' in Trump Budget Request That Trashes Workers, Struggling Families | Common Dreams
One expert critic said the updated request "confirms once again that the president continues to break his promises to lower families' costs and help people who are struggling to make ends meet."

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10745 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_mat…

Changing the ranking in eigenvector centrality of a weighted graph by small perturbations
In this article, we consider eigenvector centrality for the nodes of a graph and study the robustness (and stability) of this popular centrality measure. For a given weighted graph ${\mathcal G}$ (both directed and undirected), we consider the associated weighted adjacency matrix $A$, which by definition is a non-negative matrix. The eigenvector centralities of the nodes of ${\mathcal G}$ are the entries of the Perron eigenvector of $A$, which is the (positive) eigenvector associated with the e…

Ranking Travis Hunter's chances of winning Offensive Rookie of the Year, plus top NFC minicamp storylines

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/r…

Ranking NFL's 13 new coach-quarterback duos of 2025: Bears, Vikings set to surge? Raiders poised to rebound?

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/new…

Re-ranking 2021 NFL Draft by position: Where do Trevor Lawrence, Micah Parsons fall? https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6400472/2025/06/05/nfl-draft-2021-micah-parsons-trevor-lawrence/

I've read now through the "Streets for kids" #cityranking report: https://cleancitiescampaign.org/city-ranking-2025/

Streets for Kids, Cities for All: City Ranking 2025
We've analysed 36 European cities to see how they’re progressing in creating transport systems that prioritise the needs of children.

Trust in the Trenches: NFC East offensive line rankings for 2025 https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/06/02/ranking-offensive-line-nfc-east-cowboys-eagles-command…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18407 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_sta…

A Statistical Framework for Ranking LLM-Based Chatbots
Large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, with frameworks like Chatbot Arena providing pioneering platforms for evaluating these models. By facilitating millions of pairwise comparisons based on human judgments, Chatbot Arena has become a cornerstone in LLM evaluation, offering rich datasets for ranking models in open-ended conversational tasks. Building upon this foundation, we propose a statistical framework that incorporates key advancements to address specif…

Rethinking Hybrid Retrieval: When Small Embeddings and LLM Re-ranking Beat Bigger Models
Arjun Rao, Hanieh Alipour, Nick Pendar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00049

Rethinking Hybrid Retrieval: When Small Embeddings and LLM Re-ranking Beat Bigger Models
This paper presents a comparison of embedding models in tri-modal hybrid retrieval for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. We investigate the fusion of dense semantic, sparse lexical, and graph-based embeddings, focusing on the performance of the MiniLM-v6 and BGE-Large architectures. Contrary to conventional assumptions, our results show that the compact MiniLM-v6 outperforms the larger BGE-Large when integrated with LLM-based re-ranking within our tri-modal hybrid framework. Experim…

Ranking new QB/WR duos: Dak Prescott and George Pickens fall behind other NFC tandem

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/ranking-new-qbwr…

Greater Manchester still has a long way to go on protected cycling infrastructure.
Share of protected cycling infra-
structure of total roads %:
Paris 44
Hamburg 33
Barcelona 19
Waraw 15
G London 8
Manchester 8 rank 29/36
Did better on school streets and safe speeds
https…

Streets for Kids, Cities for All: Protected cycling infrastructure ranking
We've analysed 36 European cities to see how they’re progressing in creating transport systems that prioritise the needs of children.

Ah, FFOTUS' judicial appointments reach the bottom of the barrel - even Bork was far better as a judge and more ethical.
"Ex-Trump defense lawyer Emil Bove, a top Justice Department official, is picked to be federal judge"
https://ap…

Ex-Trump lawyer Emil Bove, a top Justice Department official, is picked to be federal judge
President Donald Trump says he's nominating his former criminal defense lawyer Emil Bove to become a federal appeals court judge. As a high-ranking Justice Department official, Bove was behind the controversial move to drop the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams as well as some of the agency’s most scrutinized actions since Trump’s return to the White House in January. Trump has picked Bove to fill a vacancy on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases fro…

I solved this JoWordle 1202 with 3/6 attempts in 6:47 minutes. Can you do better?
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️
🟪⬜️⬜️🟪⬜️
🟦🟦🟦🟦🟦
https://word.rodeo/JoWordle/

JoWordle
A timed word puzzle with an opt-in weekly ranking competition and free archive

Most likely to win first Super Bowl in 2025 NFL season? Ranking 12 teams that lack Lombardi Trophy https://www.nfl.com/news/most-likely-to-win-first-super-bowl-in-2025-nfl-season-ranking-12-teams-that-lack-lombar…

Scaling Transformers for Discriminative Recommendation via Generative Pretraining
Chunqi Wang, Bingchao Wu, Zheng Chen, Lei Shen, Bing Wang, Xiaoyi Zeng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03699

Scaling Transformers for Discriminative Recommendation via Generative Pretraining
Discriminative recommendation tasks, such as CTR (click-through rate) and CVR (conversion rate) prediction, play critical roles in the ranking stage of large-scale industrial recommender systems. However, training a discriminative model encounters a significant overfitting issue induced by data sparsity. Moreover, this overfitting issue worsens with larger models, causing them to underperform smaller ones. To address the overfitting issue and enhance model scalability, we propose a framework na…

Ranking 2025 NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year candidates, plus best bets: Who can challenge Ashton Jeanty?

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/rank…

#ListeningClub Ranking full stopppp.

Worst-to-first rankings: Which teams could skyrocket to the top of their divisions? https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45391110/2025-nfl-season-worst-first-division-odds-predictions

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09795 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_…

Beyond Pairwise Learning-To-Rank At Airbnb
There are three fundamental asks from a ranking algorithm: it should scale to handle a large number of items, sort items accurately by their utility, and impose a total order on the items for logical consistency. But here's the catch-no algorithm can achieve all three at the same time. We call this limitation the SAT theorem for ranking algorithms. Given the dilemma, how can we design a practical system that meets user needs? Our current work at Airbnb provides an answer, with a working solutio…

Greater Manchester still has a long way to go on protected cycling infrastructure.
Share of protected cycling infra-
structure of total roads %:
Paris 44
Hamburg 33
Barcelona 19
Waraw 15
G London 8
Manchester 8 rank 29/36
Did better on school streets and safe speeds
https…

Streets for Kids, Cities for All: Protected cycling infrastructure ranking
We've analysed 36 European cities to see how they’re progressing in creating transport systems that prioritise the needs of children.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17836 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_sta…

Robust Distributed Estimation: Extending Gossip Algorithms to Ranking and Trimmed Means
This paper addresses the problem of robust estimation in gossip algorithms over arbitrary communication graphs. Gossip algorithms are fully decentralized, relying only on local neighbor-to-neighbor communication, making them well-suited for situations where communication is constrained. A fundamental challenge in existing mean-based gossip algorithms is their vulnerability to malicious or corrupted nodes. In this paper, we show that an outlier-robust mean can be computed by globally estimating …

PSBench: a large-scale benchmark for estimating the accuracy of protein complex structural models
Pawan Neupane, Jian Liu, Jianlin Cheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22674

PSBench: a large-scale benchmark for estimating the accuracy of protein complex structural models
Predicting protein complex structures is essential for protein function analysis, protein design, and drug discovery. While AI methods like AlphaFold can predict accurate structural models for many protein complexes, reliably estimating the quality of these predicted models (estimation of model accuracy, or EMA) for model ranking and selection remains a major challenge. A key barrier to developing effective machine learning-based EMA methods is the lack of large, diverse, and well-annotated dat…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19755 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_…

One Model to Rank Them All: Unifying Online Advertising with End-to-End Learning
Modern industrial advertising systems commonly employ Multi-stage Cascading Architectures (MCA) to balance computational efficiency with ranking accuracy. However, this approach presents two fundamental challenges: (1) performance inconsistencies arising from divergent optimization targets and capability differences between stages, and (2) failure to account for advertisement externalities - the complex interactions between candidate ads during ranking. These limitations ultimately compromise s…

Prestige in Numbers: How Test Scores and Choices Reveal School Rankings
Federico Echenique, Michael Olabisi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21063 https://

Prestige in Numbers: How Test Scores and Choices Reveal School Rankings
This paper introduces a novel revealed-preference approach to ranking colleges and professional schools based on applicants' choices and standardized test scores. Unlike traditional rankings that rely on data supplied by institutions or expert opinions, our methodology leverages the decentralized beliefs of potential students, as revealed through their application decisions. We develop a theoretical model where students with higher test scores apply to more selective institutions, allowing us t…

Kyle Liu is the Head of Engineering at Mercari, a second-hand e-commerce marketplace based in Japan. His team has been using Elastic Search for retrieval and DNN Learning to Rank for ranking for a long time. At #bbuzz, he will discuss how they re-architected their search system in response to developments in deep learning and LLM, and how they successfully convinced internal stakeholders to adopt new…

TransAct V2: Lifelong User Action Sequence Modeling on Pinterest Recommendation
Xue Xia, Saurabh Vishwas Joshi, Kousik Rajesh, Kangnan Li, Yangyi Lu, Nikil Pancha, Dhruvil Deven Badani, Jiajing Xu, Pong Eksombatchai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02267

TransAct V2: Lifelong User Action Sequence Modeling on Pinterest Recommendation
Modeling user action sequences has become a popular focus in industrial recommendation system research, particularly for Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction tasks. However, industry-scale CTR models often rely on short user sequences, limiting their ability to capture long-term behavior. Additionally, these models typically lack an integrated action-prediction task within a point-wise ranking framework, reducing their predictive power. They also rarely address the infrastructure challenges invo…

Why Lamar Jackson could get $70 million per year, plus ranking 12 teams who could win their first Super Bowl

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news…

CeeDee Lamb disrespected in wide receiver rankings for 2025 season https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/ceedee-lamb-disrespected-nfl-wide-receiver-rankings-2025-season

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09492 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_…

Learning Cascade Ranking as One Network
Cascade Ranking is a prevalent architecture in large-scale top-k selection systems like recommendation and advertising platforms. Traditional training methods focus on single-stage optimization, neglecting interactions between stages. Recent advances have introduced interaction-aware training paradigms, but still struggle to 1) align training objectives with the goal of the entire cascade ranking (i.e., end-to-end recall of ground-truth items) and 2) learn effective collaboration patterns for d…

Deep Retrieval at CheckThat! 2025: Identifying Scientific Papers from Implicit Social Media Mentions via Hybrid Retrieval and Re-Ranking
Pascal J. Sager, Ashwini Kamaraj, Benjamin F. Grewe, Thilo Stadelmann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23250

Deep Retrieval at CheckThat! 2025: Identifying Scientific Papers from Implicit Social Media Mentions via Hybrid Retrieval and Re-Ranking
We present the methodology and results of the Deep Retrieval team for subtask 4b of the CLEF CheckThat! 2025 competition, which focuses on retrieving relevant scientific literature for given social media posts. To address this task, we propose a hybrid retrieval pipeline that combines lexical precision, semantic generalization, and deep contextual re-ranking, enabling robust retrieval that bridges the informal-to-formal language gap. Specifically, we combine BM25-based keyword matching with a F…

Mario Kart Wii: chasing ghosts
As mentioned in my post on the closing of Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, I spent a fair amount of time online playing Mario Kart Wii. I had intended to spend time playing multiplayer games, tying to improve my fairly rubbish ranking of 5100, but in fact I found that the online time trials were a bigger draw. The way the ghost races were set up was very clever.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22238 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_…

Yambda-5B -- A Large-Scale Multi-modal Dataset for Ranking And Retrieval
We present Yambda-5B, a large-scale open dataset sourced from the Yandex.Music streaming platform. Yambda-5B contains 4.79 billion user-item interactions from 1 million users across 9.39 million tracks. The dataset includes two primary types of interactions: implicit feedback (listening events) and explicit feedback (likes, dislikes, unlikes and undislikes). In addition, we provide audio embeddings for most tracks, generated by a convolutional neural network trained on audio spectrograms. A key…

Mixture of Encoders is a vector-native alternative that models both structured and unstructured data in a unified embedding space. Join Filip Makraduli as he introduces the method, demonstrates how it powers natural language search and real-time recommendations, and shares open-source tools and benchmarks for replacing complex hybrid stacks.
Learn more:

Mixture of Encoders: A Vector-Native Approach to Search
Filters, hybrid search, rank fusion, re-ranking. Most retrieval systems today are stitched together from separate components, each tuned in isolation. There is no systematic way to integrate structured data into vector search. Ask anyone maintaining a mature Elasticsearch deployment with 100+ boosts and hand-written scoring logic whether they can still evaluate retrieval quality end to end and iterate quickly. The answer is almost always no. To address this, you need models that understand both…

Breaker: Removing Shortcut Cues with User Clustering for Single-slot Recommendation System
Chao Wang, Yue Zheng, Yujing Zhang, Yan Feng, Zhe Wang, Xiaowei Shi, An You, Yu Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00828

Breaker: Removing Shortcut Cues with User Clustering for Single-slot Recommendation System
In a single-slot recommendation system, users are only exposed to one item at a time, and the system cannot collect user feedback on multiple items simultaneously. Therefore, only pointwise modeling solutions can be adopted, focusing solely on modeling the likelihood of clicks or conversions for items by users to learn user-item preferences, without the ability to capture the ranking information among different items directly. However, since user-side information is often much more abundant tha…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17057 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_…

ExpandR: Teaching Dense Retrievers Beyond Queries with LLM Guidance
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in enhancing dense retrieval through query augmentation. However, most existing methods treat the LLM and the retriever as separate modules, overlooking the alignment between generation and ranking objectives. In this work, we propose ExpandR, a unified LLM-augmented dense retrieval framework that jointly optimizes both the LLM and the retriever. ExpandR employs the LLM to generate semantically rich query expansions, which are…