Preference Elicitation for Step-Wise Explanations in Logic Puzzles

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Foschini, Marco, Defresne, Marianne, Gamba, Emilio, Bogaerts, Bart, Guns, Tias
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Foschini, Marco
Defresne, Marianne
Gamba, Emilio
Bogaerts, Bart
Guns, Tias
author_facet Foschini, Marco
Defresne, Marianne
Gamba, Emilio
Bogaerts, Bart
Guns, Tias
contents Step-wise explanations can explain logic puzzles and other satisfaction problems by showing how to derive decisions step by step. Each step consists of a set of constraints that derive an assignment to one or more decision variables. However, many candidate explanation steps exist, with different sets of constraints and different decisions they derive. To identify the most comprehensible one, a user-defined objective function is required to quantify the quality of each step. However, defining a good objective function is challenging. Here, interactive preference elicitation methods from the wider machine learning community can offer a way to learn user preferences from pairwise comparisons. We investigate the feasibility of this approach for step-wise explanations and address several limitations that distinguish it from elicitation for standard combinatorial problems. First, because the explanation quality is measured using multiple sub-objectives that can vary a lot in scale, we propose two dynamic normalization techniques to rescale these features and stabilize the learning process. We also observed that many generated comparisons involve similar explanations. For this reason, we introduce MACHOP (Multi-Armed CHOice Perceptron), a novel query generation strategy that integrates non-domination constraints with upper confidence bound-based diversification. We evaluate the elicitation techniques on Sudokus and Logic-Grid puzzles using artificial users, and validate them with a real-user evaluation. In both settings, MACHOP consistently produces higher-quality explanations than the standard approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_10436
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Preference Elicitation for Step-Wise Explanations in Logic Puzzles
Foschini, Marco
Defresne, Marianne
Gamba, Emilio
Bogaerts, Bart
Guns, Tias
Artificial Intelligence
Step-wise explanations can explain logic puzzles and other satisfaction problems by showing how to derive decisions step by step. Each step consists of a set of constraints that derive an assignment to one or more decision variables. However, many candidate explanation steps exist, with different sets of constraints and different decisions they derive. To identify the most comprehensible one, a user-defined objective function is required to quantify the quality of each step. However, defining a good objective function is challenging. Here, interactive preference elicitation methods from the wider machine learning community can offer a way to learn user preferences from pairwise comparisons. We investigate the feasibility of this approach for step-wise explanations and address several limitations that distinguish it from elicitation for standard combinatorial problems. First, because the explanation quality is measured using multiple sub-objectives that can vary a lot in scale, we propose two dynamic normalization techniques to rescale these features and stabilize the learning process. We also observed that many generated comparisons involve similar explanations. For this reason, we introduce MACHOP (Multi-Armed CHOice Perceptron), a novel query generation strategy that integrates non-domination constraints with upper confidence bound-based diversification. We evaluate the elicitation techniques on Sudokus and Logic-Grid puzzles using artificial users, and validate them with a real-user evaluation. In both settings, MACHOP consistently produces higher-quality explanations than the standard approach.
title Preference Elicitation for Step-Wise Explanations in Logic Puzzles
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10436