Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র

Information Retrieval Researcher 🇵🇸🍉✊🏽🕊️ | Pronouns: He/him

[Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র @UnderdogGeek]

A personal update.
https://t.co/4YjcpFnBpU

[Sajad Ebrahimi @sadjadeb]

A huge thanks to my amazing co-authors:
@UnderdogGeek , @NegarEmpr , @StevenYuan666 , @Haolun_Wu0203 , @FattaneZ , and @ebrahim_bagheri for the incredible collaboration on this research.

Check out our implementation on GitHub: https://t.co/JR5xpDLtQc

[Sajad Ebrahimi @sadjadeb]

5/ 📈 Key benefits:
✅ Learns a more robust relevance estimation function by modeling the joint distribution over features + labels
✅ Matches inference cost of discriminative models
✅ Outperforms discriminative baselines on standard LTR datasets in our experiments.

[Sajad Ebrahimi @sadjadeb]

4/ ✨ DiffusionRank
Instead of directly predicting scores, we corrupt feature-label pairs (noise) and learn a denoising reverse process that reconstructs clean data — essentially learning to rank by denoising.

[Sajad Ebrahimi @sadjadeb]

3/ 🔍 Why generative?
👉 Discriminative models focus only on relevance given features.
👉 Our hypothesis: the solution that fits the full joint distribution under the generative setting leads to more accurate relevance estimation.

[Sajad Ebrahimi @sadjadeb]

2/🧠 What’s this about?
Traditional learning-to-rank models are discriminative: they learn to score documents given features. In contrast, we introduce a generative LTR approach based on denoising diffusion, modeling the full joint distribution over features and relevance labels.

[Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র @UnderdogGeek]

Happy to see this work published! This was a fun project combining learning-to-rank fundamentals with diffusion modeling. Best of all, it was nice to work on generative modeling without needing climate-devastating scale of resources and extractive data labor practices! #ICTIR2026

[Sajad Ebrahimi @sadjadeb]

Excited to announce that our paper “From Noise to Order: Learning to Rank via Denoising Diffusion” has been accepted to #ICTIR2026! 🎉📚

📄Paper: https://t.co/7yIdF2VBJ1
💻 Code: https://t.co/JR5xpDLtQc

[Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র @UnderdogGeek]

**NTCIR Tip-of-the-Tongue Shared Task**
Participate in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and/or English. #NTCIR2026 #NTCIRToT #NTCIR2026ToT

Registration deadline: June 1
Runs submission deadline: July 30
Guidelines: https://t.co/fPhSZUIz9x
Register: https://t.co/YFFueipzdK

See 🧵...

[NTCIR @NTCIR]

🧵 Have you ever tried to re-find a movie you watched but cannot remember its name? Perhaps you vaguely remember the plot or a scene or the context in which you watched it. That's a Tip-of-the-Tongue (ToT) information need. Current search engines cannot solve them. #NTCIR19 (1/5)

[The Syllabus @syllabus_tweets]

The unchecked growth of AI and information retrieval systems is leading to their misuse. This lecture contrasts liberal frameworks' focus on fairness and accountability with the critical lens that centers justice.

Ft. @UnderdogGeek at @UCLDIS

https://t.co/eFAXh9EjWA

[Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র @UnderdogGeek]

"Rooted in anti-colonial legacies... When Southasians organise across faith, class, & national origin lines, standing with Black, Latino, white working-class, & other allies, they help fracture the divide-and-rule strategies that sustain far-right growth."
https://t.co/Szk4WzFYTX

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression. Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war.  Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change. They want relief from the affordability crisis. They want peace.

I am focused on making sure that every New Yorker is safe. I have been in contact with our Police Commissioner and emergency management officials. We are taking proactive steps, including increasing coordination across agencies and enhancing patrols of sensitive locations out of an abundance of caution.

Additionally, I want to speak directly to Iranian New Yorkers: you are part of the fabric of this city — you are our neighbors, small business owners, students, artists, workers, and community leaders. You will be safe here.

[Harsha Walia (she/her) @HarshaWalia]

To everyone who cheerleaded Carney's faux speech in Davos & posturing as independent middle power -

His atrocious statement today backing US-Israeli attacks on Iran make clear that he is firmly aligned with dominant imperial interests

And he did so while shaking hands with Modi

[Harsha Walia (she/her) @HarshaWalia]

Canadian companies are arming Israel's genocide in Gaza, Trump's illegal wars, and ICE raids. The U.S. Loophole means 60% of Canadian arms exports — those that go to US — are exempted from oversight or permitting.

Canada must pass No More Loopholes Act

https://t.co/BfRFdxfJBE

[Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) @csohate]

As India prepares to host the AI Impact Summit 2026, @csohate and @internetfreedom today released a policy report examining the stark disconnect between India's official AI rhetoric and the ground reality of AI-enabled hate, discrimination, surveillance, repression and violence against minority and marginalized communities that is occuring in an overall enviroment of democratic backsliding.

[ACM SIGIR @ACMSIGIR]

IR friends, the SIGIR Executive Committee is soliciting community input on safety of potential conference locations to inform the selection of future venues. Link to the survey has been shared over SIGIR Slack and SIG-IRList. Please fill-in the survey, we want to hear from you!🫵🏽

[Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র @UnderdogGeek]

#AnaFalastini

[Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র @UnderdogGeek]

protect our platforms from authoritarian/corporate capture in light of today's grim political realities. We cordially invite you to join this critical conversation and work together to build more joyful, humanizing, and emancipatory information futures. More details coming soon!

[Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র @UnderdogGeek]

Super excited to share that our #SIGIR2026 workshop proposal "Justice, Emancipation, Democracy, and Information Access (JEDI): The SIGIR Workshop on Resisting Corporate and Authoritarian Capture of Information Access Platforms" has been accepted! 🎉🎉🎉

cc: @ACMSIGIR

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[Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র @UnderdogGeek]

@DanaChatter, Michael Ekstrand, @sannevrijenhoek, Maria Murray, and I proposed this workshop to create what we believe is a much-needed space in our community to reflect on how we can realize information access as a force for justice, emancipation, and democracy; and...

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[Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র @UnderdogGeek]

"I am the sea
In my depths all treasures dwell."

[Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র @UnderdogGeek]

Such a heart-wrenchingly beautiful movie.