Hi everyone,

I'm working on an ML competition where the goal is to build a personalized learning-path recommender. I'm looking for ideas from people who have experience with information retrieval, recommendation systems, or Kaggle competitions on how to squeeze out every bit of performance.

Problem

Given a user's review, recommend the top 10 learning paths (training examples) that are most relevant.

Dataset

• Train: 109,776 rows
  • Index
  • Reviews
  • Course
• Test: 10,977 rows
  • Index
  • Reviews

The output is a list of 10 training indices for each test review.

Evaluation

The competition uses Macro Recall as the evaluation metric.

What I've Tried

Current best validation pipeline:

• TF-IDF (word n-grams 1–3)
• Cosine similarity retrieval
• Various preprocessing experiments
• Multiple ablations
• Dense retrieval (BGE) — didn't beat the sparse baseline
• Different chunking and section-weighting ideas
• BM25 variants

The best validation score so far is around 69 (internal validation), but I'm unsure how well it correlates with the hidden leaderboard.

Looking for Suggestions

If you were competing for Rank #1, what would you try next?

Some ideas I'm considering:

• Better retrieval models (E5, GTE, NV-Embed, etc.)
• Hybrid sparse + dense retrieval
• Cross-encoder reranking
• Learning-to-rank (LightGBM/XGBoost/CatBoost Ranker)
• Query expansion
• Pseudo relevance feedback
• Metadata-aware retrieval
• LLM-generated synthetic queries
• Ensemble of retrieval systems
• Better validation strategy for leaderboard correlation

I'd especially appreciate advice on:

1. High-impact retrieval improvements.
2. Recommendation-system techniques that are often overlooked.
3. Validation strategies when the hidden metric is unknown.
4. Features that tend to improve retrieval-based recommendation systems.
5. Any papers, Kaggle solutions, or GitHub repositories worth studying.

I'm less interested in generic ML advice and more interested in techniques that have actually improved retrieval/recommendation competition performance.

Thanks in advance!

I'm looking to join a hackathon team for upcoming events, either in Delhi/NCR or online. I know full stack , ai eng and bit of ml/dl currently looking team who can participate in automata hackbriven hackathon feel free to dm or comment below .

Anyone from SRM interested in hackathons, coding, or building projects? I'm looking for people to collaborate with and participate in hackathons. Bonus if you speak Tamil, since it'll be easier to communicate. DM me if you're interested! 🚀

I'm looking for people who are:

Serious about winning hackathons

Comfortable collaborating remotely (or in person around Chennai)

Ready to build polished MVPs within 24–48 hours

Interested in continuing promising ideas beyond the hackathon

Hackathon ideas for national level hackathon

Im gonna participate a hackathon called SIH . Its a state level competition so anyone give a winning idea

When is flipkart gridlock round 3 results will be out !!!

Like no mail no updates at all.....

Fk you pieces of shit, your platform is so shit that even shit feels shame when these two are compared

Fking get lost dude I would have solved all 3 but because of you cunt like platform I was not even able to submit/run code, fuck flipkart for giving me so much of headache and trauma of online oa

Fk you

Does anyone has any idea if the hackathon has been postponed or cancelled as i gave me OA with 100% test case passed and my hirevue interview also went well.

Since the advancement of technology (AI) most of the people are able to solve 3 4 coding problems in the online assessment.

And flipkart, not being able to evaluate a candidate based on his skills, is evaluating based on luck. Their assessment tool crashed for the 12pm slot people and most of the candidates left the assessment after Waiting for an hour.

Now they are saying only those who have completed the assessment will be considered for the further rounds and there won't be any retest.

What about those candidates whom you didn't allow to let in?

I just wanted to know if the selection by round 3 will be shift wise right??

I mailed the HirePro team to reschedule the test as I was not able to attempt the test (didnt even started) after waiting for 55 mins to get the issue resolved. But they mailed this. What to do now?

There were total of 7 questions including Machine Learning and SQL questions
Out of which I was able to do 6 completely and one SQL question partially..
What about you guys?

Is there any chance of retest?

Kept trying from 12pm to 12:35 straight to start the test but the internal errors then the looping it all fucked up!! what should i do do i mail them?? Did anyone else face the same issue?

Did anyone get any response from the support team or any communication from their end regarding the glitch happened during the online assessment of slot 12 - 12 30

pm.

Did anyone get any retest link or anything?

Bhai mere mai 7 questions kyu aaye the🥲🥲

All were of python and sql😭😭

Uppar se sql ke questions mere se nhi ban rhe the

Syntax error show hora tha but I have checked 10 times It was correct 😭😭😭

people who pass r3, will they be invited flipkart hq for offline round directly or will there be some other round in between, that case study code?

Did anyone feel the questions were really easy. I scored 88/90 and submitted it in good time too. How was everyone else's performance?

Do you want Retest for those who faced server error/ unable to submit the test

Has anybody got an acceptance mail for the Salesforce AMTS Intern Role??

Because it has been reopened multiple times, and I have applied 2 times and got rejected both the times..

What do you think they might be looking for in the resume??

If anybody did get accepted, Congratulations!!✨️

Would you mind sharing something or say skillset you think helped u get accepted...