This document discusses objective functions used in recommender systems, including mean average precision (MAP) and mean reciprocal rank (MRR). It proposes a new objective function called smoothed reciprocal ranking (SRR) and describes how to optimize it using gradient descent. SRR approximates MRR by smoothing the indicator function used in MRR. The document derives a lower bound for SRR's objective function and calculates the gradient to optimize latent user and item factors to maximize SRR.