Pairwise Ranking Outperforms Single-Action RL for Offline Explanation Selection: A Practical Lesson

arXiv:2608.18531 · cs.AI, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-08-19 · Read on arXiv

cs.AI, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-08-19

Updated: 2026-09-20

Comments: This is an extended version of a 3-page paper accepted to the RecSys 2026 Research and Practice Notes track

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Distillation — 28× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• GRPO — 22× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Benchmark — 16× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Consistency — 5× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 5× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Knowledge Graph — 5× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Provenance — 5× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Grounding — 4× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Robustness — 4× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Alignment — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Core — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Action Space — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Embeddings — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Teacher-Student Distillation — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Two-Stage Framework — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Unique-Sentence Ratio — 2× in this paper
• Ablation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Accuracy — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Cosine Similarity — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Decoupling — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Distribution Shift — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Entropy Collapse — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Failure Modes — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Feature Extraction — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fidelity — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Knowledge Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 11 episodes
• Model Drift — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Reward Hacking — 1× in this paper · explained in 8 episodes

Sources

• Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network
• Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms
• DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models

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