Bias Robustness of Genetic Multi-Criteria Sorting versus Learned Rankers under Proxy Skew and Label Contamination

Abstract

Learning-to-rank (LTR) models can align rankings with undesignated signals when those signals appear as features or leak into training labels. We compare label-free genetic multi-criteria sorting (open Pikaia strategy variants), which reranks fixed candidate pools using an explicit criteria vector C, to label-trained LTR (LightGBM, XGBoost, RankSVM) under two controlled protocols on MSLR-WEB10K, Baidu-ULTR, WANDS, and Expedia. In the main proxy-skew study, labels remain clean while a calibrated proxy P is available as a feature: Genetic AI rankings show lower Spearman rank-proxy correlation than the LTR peers (e.g. about 0.15-0.16 vs. 0.59-0.87 on WANDS), with both families evaluated jointly on clean nDCG@10 on a bias-utility frontier. In a supporting label-contamination study, training labels are mixed with contaminant B: because Genetic AI methods do not use labels, their bias and utility curves stay flat, whereas LightGBM and XGBoost increase rank-B correlation as contamination rises (OLS bias_slope about 0.58-0.65 on WANDS/Baidu). The results support genetic sorting as an architectural option for optimizing declared attributes on a fixed pool when undesignated proxies or label contaminants must be refused.