  In designing personalized ranking algorithms, it is desirable to encourage a
high precision at the top of the ranked list. Existing methods either seek a
smooth convex surrogate for a non-smooth ranking metric or directly modify
updating procedures to encourage top accuracy. In this work we point out that
these methods do not scale well to a large-scale setting, and this is partly
due to the inaccurate pointwise or pairwise rank estimation. We propose a new
framework for personalized ranking. It uses batch-based rank estimators and
smooth rank-sensitive loss functions. This new batch learning framework leads
to more stable and accurate rank approximations compared to previous work.
Moreover, it enables explicit use of parallel computation to speed up training.
We conduct empirical evaluation on three item recommendation tasks. Our method
shows consistent accuracy improvements over state-of-the-art methods.
Additionally, we observe time efficiency advantages when data scale increases.
