Exact Risk Certificates for Pairwise-Judged Reranking
cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-10-17
Updated: 2026-10-17
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Pairwise relevance judgments constrain both the loss numerator and the ideal-ranking denominator of nDCG.
Abstract
Pairwise relevance judgments constrain both the loss numerator and the ideal-ranking denominator of nDCG. We characterize the exact worst-case loss of replacing a ranking with a fixed proposal. Binary gains attain this loss and provide an inspectable witness. Threshold verification reduces to at most K+1 maximum-closure problems. Our exposure-flow ablation isolates denominator coupling: on shared judge trajectories, exact verification saves 2.34 comparisons per TREC-DL development query and 1.98 per confirmation query at a budget of 32. Savings transfer to BEIR and a second proposer. Predictive gates achieve higher deployment gains, while certificates expose the worst gains still permitted by accepted comparisons.
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