# Unbiased Learning to Rank with Query-Level Click Propensity Estimation: Beyond Pointwise Observation and Relevance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11414 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11414/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Feb 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [RLPO: Residual Listwise Preference Optimization for Long-Context Review Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07449/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most existing unbiased learning-to-rank (ULTR) approaches are based on the user examination hypothesis, which assumes that users will click a result only if it is both relevant and observed (typically modeled by position). However, in real-world scenarios, users often click only one or two results after examining multiple relevant options, due to limited patience or because their information needs have already been satisfied. Motivated by this, we propose a query-level click propensity model to capture the probability that users will click on different result lists, allowing for non-zero probabilities that users may not click on an observed relevant result. We hypothesize that this propensity increases when more potentially relevant results are present, and refer to this user behavior as relevance saturation bias. Our method introduces a Dual Inverse Propensity Weighting (DualIPW) mechanism -- combining query-level and position-level IPW -- to address both relevance saturation and position bias. Through theoretical derivation, we prove that DualIPW can learn an unbiased ranking model. Experiments on the real-world Baidu-ULTR dataset demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art ULTR baselines. The code and dataset information can be found at https://github.com/Trustworthy-Information-Access/DualIPW.