Contextual Plackett-Luce: An Efficient Neural Model for Probabilistic Sequence Selection under Ambiguity

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Mizrachi, Noam, Har-Tuv, Nadav, Shalev-Shwartz, Shai
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Mizrachi, Noam
Har-Tuv, Nadav
Shalev-Shwartz, Shai
author_facet Mizrachi, Noam
Har-Tuv, Nadav
Shalev-Shwartz, Shai
contents Selecting a coherent sequence or subset of elements is a fundamental problem in structured prediction, arising in tasks such as detection, trajectory forecasting, and representative subset selection. In many such settings, the target is inherently ambiguous: each input admits multiple valid outputs, while supervision provides only a single sampled instance. This induces a mismatch between the underlying multi-modal target distribution and the observed training signal. We propose Contextual Plackett-Luce (CPL), a structured probabilistic model for sequence selection that extends the classical Plackett-Luce model to a context-dependent setting following an Ising-style parameterization with unary and pairwise interaction terms. CPL can be viewed as a hybrid between fully autoregressive prediction and parallel sequence selection: autoregressive models effectively capture uncertainty but are computationally expensive on modern parallel hardware such as GPUs, while parallel methods are efficient but struggle to represent multi-modal dependencies. CPL combines the strengths of both by constructing the parameters of a probabilistic selection model in a fully parallel manner, followed by a lightweight autoregressive selection process in which each step applies incremental updates to contextual logits. This decoupling of parallel scoring and sequential selection enables efficient computation without sacrificing expressivity. We evaluate CPL on two structured selection tasks: multi-modal path prediction and representative subset selection. CPL achieves improved structural consistency and robustness under ambiguous supervision compared to strong parallel baselines.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_09112
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Contextual Plackett-Luce: An Efficient Neural Model for Probabilistic Sequence Selection under Ambiguity
Mizrachi, Noam
Har-Tuv, Nadav
Shalev-Shwartz, Shai
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Selecting a coherent sequence or subset of elements is a fundamental problem in structured prediction, arising in tasks such as detection, trajectory forecasting, and representative subset selection. In many such settings, the target is inherently ambiguous: each input admits multiple valid outputs, while supervision provides only a single sampled instance. This induces a mismatch between the underlying multi-modal target distribution and the observed training signal. We propose Contextual Plackett-Luce (CPL), a structured probabilistic model for sequence selection that extends the classical Plackett-Luce model to a context-dependent setting following an Ising-style parameterization with unary and pairwise interaction terms. CPL can be viewed as a hybrid between fully autoregressive prediction and parallel sequence selection: autoregressive models effectively capture uncertainty but are computationally expensive on modern parallel hardware such as GPUs, while parallel methods are efficient but struggle to represent multi-modal dependencies. CPL combines the strengths of both by constructing the parameters of a probabilistic selection model in a fully parallel manner, followed by a lightweight autoregressive selection process in which each step applies incremental updates to contextual logits. This decoupling of parallel scoring and sequential selection enables efficient computation without sacrificing expressivity. We evaluate CPL on two structured selection tasks: multi-modal path prediction and representative subset selection. CPL achieves improved structural consistency and robustness under ambiguous supervision compared to strong parallel baselines.
title Contextual Plackett-Luce: An Efficient Neural Model for Probabilistic Sequence Selection under Ambiguity
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09112