DeepVoting: Learning Voting Rules with Tailored Embeddings

Abstract

Aggregating the preferences of multiple agents into a collective decision is a common step in many important problems across areas of computer science including information retrieval, reinforcement learning, and recommender systems. As Social Choice Theory has shown, the problem of designing algorithms for aggregation rules with specific properties (axioms) can be difficult, or provably impossible in some cases. Instead of designing algorithms by hand, one can learn aggregation rules, particularly voting rules, from data. However, the prior work in this area has required extremely large models, or been limited by the choice of preference representation, i.e., embedding. We recast the problem of designing a good voting rule into one of learning probabilistic versions of voting rules that output distributions over a set of candidates. Specifically, we use neural networks to learn probabilistic social choice functions from the literature. We show that embeddings of preference profiles derived from the social choice literature allows us to learn existing voting rules more efficiently and scale to larger populations of voters more easily than other work if the embedding is tailored to the learning objective. Moreover, we show that rules learned using embeddings can be tweaked to create novel voting rules with improved axiomatic properties. Namely, we show that existing voting rules require only minor modification to combat a probabilistic version of the No Show Paradox.