Overcoming Over-Fitting in Constraint Acquisition via Query-Driven Interactive Refinement

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Balafas, Vasileios, Tsouros, Dimos, Ploskas, Nikolaos, Stergiou, Kostas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Balafas, Vasileios
Tsouros, Dimos
Ploskas, Nikolaos
Stergiou, Kostas
author_facet Balafas, Vasileios
Tsouros, Dimos
Ploskas, Nikolaos
Stergiou, Kostas
contents Manual modeling in Constraint Programming is a substantial bottleneck, which Constraint Acquisition (CA) aims to automate. However, passive CA methods are prone to over-fitting, often learning models that include spurious global constraints when trained on limited data, while purely active methods can be query-intensive. We introduce a hybrid CA framework specifically designed to address the challenge of over-fitting in CA. Our approach integrates passive learning for initial candidate generation, a query-driven interactive refinement phase that utilizes probabilistic confidence scores (initialized by machine learning priors) to systematically identify over-fitted constraints, and a specialized subset exploration mechanism to recover valid substructures from rejected candidates. A final active learning phase ensures model completeness. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our interactive refinement phase is crucial for achieving high target model coverage and overall model accuracy from limited examples, doing so with manageable query complexity. This framework represents a substantial advancement towards robust and practical constraint acquisition in data-limited scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_24489
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Overcoming Over-Fitting in Constraint Acquisition via Query-Driven Interactive Refinement
Balafas, Vasileios
Tsouros, Dimos
Ploskas, Nikolaos
Stergiou, Kostas
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Logic in Computer Science
68T20, 68Q25
I.2.8; F.2.2
Manual modeling in Constraint Programming is a substantial bottleneck, which Constraint Acquisition (CA) aims to automate. However, passive CA methods are prone to over-fitting, often learning models that include spurious global constraints when trained on limited data, while purely active methods can be query-intensive. We introduce a hybrid CA framework specifically designed to address the challenge of over-fitting in CA. Our approach integrates passive learning for initial candidate generation, a query-driven interactive refinement phase that utilizes probabilistic confidence scores (initialized by machine learning priors) to systematically identify over-fitted constraints, and a specialized subset exploration mechanism to recover valid substructures from rejected candidates. A final active learning phase ensures model completeness. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our interactive refinement phase is crucial for achieving high target model coverage and overall model accuracy from limited examples, doing so with manageable query complexity. This framework represents a substantial advancement towards robust and practical constraint acquisition in data-limited scenarios.
title Overcoming Over-Fitting in Constraint Acquisition via Query-Driven Interactive Refinement
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Logic in Computer Science
68T20, 68Q25
I.2.8; F.2.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24489