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Main Authors: Huang, David, Marmolejo-Cossío, Francisco, Lock, Edwin, Parkes, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.14625
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author Huang, David
Marmolejo-Cossío, Francisco
Lock, Edwin
Parkes, David
author_facet Huang, David
Marmolejo-Cossío, Francisco
Lock, Edwin
Parkes, David
contents Bidders in combinatorial auctions face significant challenges when describing their preferences to an auctioneer. Classical work on preference elicitation focuses on query-based techniques inspired from proper learning--often via proxies that interface between bidders and an auction mechanism--to incrementally learn bidder preferences as needed to compute efficient allocations. Although such elicitation mechanisms enjoy theoretical query efficiency, the amount of communication required may still be too cognitively taxing in practice. We propose a family of efficient LLM-based proxy designs for eliciting preferences from bidders using natural language. Our proposed mechanism combines LLM pipelines and DNF-proper-learning techniques to quickly approximate preferences when communication is limited. To validate our approach, we create a testing sandbox for elicitation mechanisms that communicate in natural language. In our experiments, our most promising LLM proxy design reaches approximately efficient outcomes with five times fewer queries than classical proper learning based elicitation mechanisms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_14625
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Accelerated Preference Elicitation with LLM-Based Proxies
Huang, David
Marmolejo-Cossío, Francisco
Lock, Edwin
Parkes, David
Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
Bidders in combinatorial auctions face significant challenges when describing their preferences to an auctioneer. Classical work on preference elicitation focuses on query-based techniques inspired from proper learning--often via proxies that interface between bidders and an auction mechanism--to incrementally learn bidder preferences as needed to compute efficient allocations. Although such elicitation mechanisms enjoy theoretical query efficiency, the amount of communication required may still be too cognitively taxing in practice. We propose a family of efficient LLM-based proxy designs for eliciting preferences from bidders using natural language. Our proposed mechanism combines LLM pipelines and DNF-proper-learning techniques to quickly approximate preferences when communication is limited. To validate our approach, we create a testing sandbox for elicitation mechanisms that communicate in natural language. In our experiments, our most promising LLM proxy design reaches approximately efficient outcomes with five times fewer queries than classical proper learning based elicitation mechanisms.
title Accelerated Preference Elicitation with LLM-Based Proxies
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.14625