An Epistemic Position-Based Click Model: From Interactions to Epistemic Distributions of Relevance and Bias
Abstract
User interactions with rankings are affected by both items' relevances and display positions. Accordingly, click probabilities are often modeled as a product of relevance and position factors; and for improving recommendation and search, one needs to disentangle relevance from position bias. However, existing click models only provide frequentist point-estimates that do not capture any measure of epistemic uncertainty. Consequently, there is no indication of how much confidence one should have in their predictions. In this work, we introduce the first evidential deep-learning approach to form an epistemic alternative to the important position-based click model. Our learned model takes as input item and position features and outputs a beta-distribution for every relevance and position-bias variable of the position-based model. These distributions capture epistemic uncertainty about click probabilities and the underlying effects of attraction and position bias. The main challenge of our approach is its optimization for which we propose approximation and conditioning techniques to provide numerical stability and variance reduction. Our experiments indicate that our approach captures epistemic uncertainty in predictions on previously-unseen data, whereas standard policy gradients fail to learn meaningful distributions. We believe our contribution of the first contextual epistemic click model constitutes an important step in incorporating Bayesian uncertainty into click modeling.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jiqun Liu | 81 | 100 A Reference-Dependent Model for Web Search Evaluation: Understanding and Measuring the Experience of Boundedly Rational Users (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction 100 Investigating Reference Dependence Effects on User Search Interaction and Satisfaction: A Behavioral Economics Perspective (2020) User Behavior and Search Interaction 100 Constructing and meta-evaluating state-aware evaluation metrics for interactive search systems (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 2 | Sara Allawati | 72 | 100 What do Users Really Ask Large Language Models? An Initial Log Analysis of Google Bard Interactions in the Wild (2024) User Behavior and Search Interaction 100 From Lab to Reality: An Eye-tracking Study of How Users are Influenced to Search in the Era of GenAI (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction 64 A Comparative Analysis of Linguistic and Retrieval Diversity in LLM-Generated Search Queries (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Ziyi Ye | 45 |
Area-chair candidates (7)
| Ziyi Ye assigned | 45 | 14 papers | |
| Zhijing Wu 0001 | 34 | 9 papers | |
| Fernando Diaz 0001 | 27 | 12 papers | |
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 | 25 | 15 papers | |
| Jun Xu 0001 | 25 | 2 papers | |
| Chenyan Xiong | 24 | 15 papers | |
| Xiaoxue Zang | 23 | 4 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jiqun Liu assigned | 81 | 3 | 100 A Reference-Dependent Model for Web Search Evaluation: Understanding and Measuring the Experience of Boundedly Rational Users (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction 100 Investigating Reference Dependence Effects on User Search Interaction and Satisfaction: A Behavioral Economics Perspective (2020) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 2 | Sara Allawati assigned | 72 | 3 | 100 What do Users Really Ask Large Language Models? An Initial Log Analysis of Google Bard Interactions in the Wild (2024) User Behavior and Search Interaction 100 From Lab to Reality: An Eye-tracking Study of How Users are Influenced to Search in the Era of GenAI (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 3 | Vuong Thanh Tung | 72 | 3 | 100 Associating cognitive abilities with naturalistic search behavior (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction 100 Naturalistic Digital Behavior Predicts Cognitive Abilities (2024) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 4 | Fan Zhang 0053 | 59 | 3 | 100 Constructing Better Evaluation Metrics by Incorporating the Anchoring Effect into the User Model (2022) User Behavior and Search Interaction 100 Evaluating Web Search with a Bejeweled Player Model (2017) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 5 | Jaime Arguello | 47 | 3 | 100 Learning assessments in search-as-learning: A survey of prior work and opportunities for future research (2022) User Behavior and Search Interaction 100 Goal-setting in support of learning during search: An exploration of learning outcomes and searcher perceptions (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 7 | Romain Deffayet | 43 | 3 | 100 An Offline Metric for the Debiasedness of Click Models (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction 100 Evaluating the Robustness of Click Models to Policy Distributional Shift (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 8 | Mark D. Smucker | 39 | 3 | 68 IR Evaluation: Modeling User Behavior for Measuring Effectiveness (2015) User Behavior and Search Interaction 68 Evaluating Streams of Evolving News Events (2015) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 9 | Falk Scholer | 39 | 3 | 64 Can Users Predict Relative Query Effectiveness? (2022) User Behavior and Search Interaction 64 Classifying Term Variants in Query Formulation (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 10 | Saber Zerhoudi | 37 | 3 | 72 From SERPs to Agents: A Platform for Comparative Studies of Information Interaction (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction 72 Beyond the Click: A Framework for Inferring Cognitive Traces in Search (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 11 | Xuanhui Wang COI: co-author | 36 | 3 | 100 Cross-Positional Attention for Debiasing Clicks (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction 62 Revisiting Two-tower Models for Unbiased Learning to Rank (2022) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 12 | Paul Thomas 0001 | 36 | 3 | 100 Third Workshop on Building towards Information Interaction and Retrieval Resources Re-use (BIIRRR 2022) (2022) User Behavior and Search Interaction 68 User Models, Metrics and Measures of Search: A Tutorial on the C/W/L Evaluation Framework (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 14 | Leif Azzopardi | 33 | 3 | 68 User Models, Metrics and Measures of Search: A Tutorial on the C/W/L Evaluation Framework (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction 64 Query quality: user ratings and system predictions (2010) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 15 | Tetsuya Sakai | 30 | 3 | 36 Give me just one highly relevant document: P-measure (2006) Evaluation Metrics and User Models 36 Diversification as Risk Minimization (2026) Evaluation Metrics and User Models |
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| 16 | Shuaiqiang Wang | 29 | 3 | 61 RankExpert: A Mixture of Textual-and-Behavioral Experts for Multi-Objective Learning-to-Rank in Web Search (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction 61 M2oERank: Multi-Objective Mixture-of-Experts Enhanced Ranking for Satisfaction-Oriented Web Search (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 17 | Yujia Zhou 0002 | 29 | 3 | 62 Incorporating Explicit Subtopics in Personalized Search (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction 62 Intent-Oriented Dynamic Interest Modeling for Personalized Web Search (2024) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 18 | Zhen Qin 0001 COI: co-author | 29 | 3 | 62 Cross-Positional Attention for Debiasing Clicks (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction 62 Revisiting Two-tower Models for Unbiased Learning to Rank (2022) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 20 | Idan Szpektor | 27 | 3 | 100 Predicting web searcher satisfaction with existing community-based answers (2011) User Behavior and Search Interaction 33 Identifying Web Queries with Question Intent (2016) Personalized and Context-Aware Retrieval |
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| 21 | Yuta Saito COI: co-author | 26 | 3 | 31 Counterfactual Evaluation and Learning for Interactive Systems: Foundations, Implementations, and Recent Advances (2022) Long-Term Engagement and Retention Optimization 31 Long-term Off-Policy Evaluation and Learning (2024) Long-Term Engagement and Retention Optimization |
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| 22 | Gustavo Penha | 26 | 3 | 62 As It Was: Aligning LLM Search Evaluation with Historical User Preferences (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction 29 Contextualizing Spotify's Audiobook List Recommendations with Descriptive Shelves (2025) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 23 | Bo Peng 0009 | 26 | 3 | 65 SWaT: Statistical Modeling of Video Watch Time through User Behavior Analysis (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction 23 eCeLLM: Generalizing Large Language Models for E-commerce from Large-scale, High-quality Instruction Data (2024) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 24 | Xiao Zhang 0034 | 26 | 3 | 31 Counterfactual Reward Modification for Streaming Recommendation with Delayed Feedback (2021) Long-Term Engagement and Retention Optimization 31 HyperBandit: Contextual Bandit with Hypernewtork for Time-Varying User Preferences in Streaming Recommendation (2023) Long-Term Engagement and Retention Optimization |
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| 25 | Negar Arabzadeh | 25 | 3 | 32 Query Performance Prediction: From Ad-hoc to Conversational Search (2023) Query Performance Prediction 28 Learning Context-aware Term Importance for Query Performance Prediction (2026) Query Performance Prediction |
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| 26 | Yifan Wang 0017 | 25 | 3 | 72 User Perception of Recommendation Explanation: Are Your Explanations What Users Need? (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction 24 Unbiased Delayed Feedback Label Correction for Conversion Rate Prediction (2023) Advertising and Auction Mechanisms |
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| 27 | Yong Li 0004 | 25 | 3 | 100 Towards an Inclusive Mobile Web: A Dataset and Framework for Focusability in UI Accessibility (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction 26 ProBench: Benchmarking GUI Agents with Accurate Process Information (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks |
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| 30 | Yang Song 0008 | 25 | 3 | 64 Query-Less: Predicting Task Repetition for NextGen Proactive Search and Recommendation Engines (2016) User Behavior and Search Interaction 30 Making Transformer Decoders Better Differentiable Indexers (2025) Generative Retrieval |
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| 31 | Jialong Wu 0007 | 25 | 3 | 29 OmniThink: Expanding Knowledge Boundaries in Machine Writing through Thinking (2025) Deep Research and Report Generation 28 WebDancer: Towards Autonomous Information Seeking Agency (2025) Deep Research and Report Generation |
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| 32 | Tingyu Song | 24 | 3 | 61 IFIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Instruction-Following in Expert-Domain Information Retrieval (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction 20 Rethinking Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval: Evaluating and Advancing Retrievers in Agentic Search Systems (2026) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 33 | Zechun Niu | 24 | 3 | 26 Investigating the Robustness of Counterfactual Learning to Rank Models: A Reproducibility Study (2025) Unbiased Learning to Rank 24 Addressing Personalized Bias for Unbiased Learning to Rank (2025) Unbiased Learning to Rank |
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| 34 | Sunhao Dai | 24 | 3 | 72 NExT-Search: Rebuilding User Feedback Ecosystem for Generative AI Search (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction 31 AdaO2B: Adaptive Online to Batch Conversion for Out-of-Distribution Generalization (2025) Long-Term Engagement and Retention Optimization |
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| 35 | Theresia Veronika Rampisela | 24 | 3 | 24 Can We Trust Recommender System Fairness Evaluation? The Role of Fairness and Relevance (2024) Fairness Metrics and Evaluation 24 Relevance-aware Individual Item Fairness Measures for Recommender Systems: Limitations and Usage Guidelines (2026) Fairness Metrics and Evaluation |