Recent work on deriving $O(\log T)$ anytime regret bounds for stochastic dueling bandit problems has considered mostly Condorcet winners, which do not always exist, and more recently, winners defined by the Copeland set, which do always exist. In this work, we consider a broad notion of winners defined by tournament solutions in social choice theory, which include the Copeland set as a special case but also include several other notions of winners such as the top cycle, uncovered set, and Banks set, and which, like the Copeland set, always exist. We develop a family of UCB-style dueling bandit algorithms for such general tournament solutions, and show $O(\log T)$ anytime regret bounds for them. Experiments confirm the ability of our algorithms to achieve low regret relative to the target winning set of interest.

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Recent work on deriving O(log T) anytime regret bounds for stochastic dueling bandit problems has considered mostly Condorcet winners, which do not always exist, and more recently, winners defined by the Copeland set, which do always exist. In this work, we consider a broad notion of winners defined by tournament solutions in social choice theory, which include the Copeland set as a special case but also include several other notions of winners such as the top cycle, uncovered set, and Banks set, and which, like the Copeland set, always exist. We develop a family of UCB-style dueling bandit algorithms for such general tournament solutions, and show O(log T) anytime regret bounds for them. Experiments confirm the ability of our algorithms to achieve low regret relative to the target winning set of interest.

A directed graph where there is exactly one edge between every pair of vertices is called a {\em tournament}. Finding the "best" set of vertices of a tournament is a well studied problem in social choice theory. A {\em tournament solution} takes a tournament as input and outputs a subset of vertices of the input tournament. However, in many applications, for example, choosing the best set of drugs from a given set of drugs, the edges of the tournament are given only implicitly and knowing the orientation of an edge is costly. In such scenarios, we would like to know the best set of vertices (according to some tournament solution) by "querying" as few edges as possible. We, in this paper, precisely study this problem for commonly used tournament solutions: given an oracle access to the edges of a tournament T, find $f(T)$ by querying as few edges as possible, for a tournament solution f. We first show that the set of Condorcet non-losers in a tournament can be found by querying $2n-\lfloor \log n \rfloor -2$ edges only and this is tight in the sense that every algorithm for finding the set of Condorcet non-losers needs to query at least $2n-\lfloor \log n \rfloor -2$ edges in the worst case, where $n$ is the number of vertices in the input tournament. We then move on to study other popular tournament solutions and show that any algorithm for finding the Copeland set, the Slater set, the Markov set, the bipartisan set, the uncovered set, the Banks set, and the top cycle must query $\Omega(n^2)$ edges in the worst case. On the positive side, we are able to circumvent our strong query complexity lower bound results by proving that, if the size of the top cycle of the input tournament is at most $k$, then we can find all the tournament solutions mentioned above by querying $O(nk + \frac{n\log n}{\log(1-\frac{1}{k})})$ edges only.

A directed graph where there is exactly one edge between every pair of vertices is called a tournament. Finding the “best” set of vertices of a tournament is a well studied problem in social choice theory. A tournament solution takes a tournament as input and outputs a subset of vertices of the input tournament. However, in many applications, for example, choosing the best set of drugs from a given set of drugs, the edges of the tournament are given only implicitly and knowing the orientation of an edge is costly. In such scenarios, we would like to know the best set of vertices (according to some tournament solution) by “querying” as few edges as possible. We, in this paper, precisely study this problem for commonly used tournament solutions: given an oracle access to the edges of a tournament T , find f(T) by querying as few edges as possible, for a tournament solution f. We first show that the set of Condorcet non-losers in a tournament can be found by querying 2n−⌊log n⌋−2 edges only and this is tight in the sense that every algorithm for finding the set of Condorcet non-losers needs to query at least 2n−⌊log n⌋−2 edges in the worst case, where n is the number of vertices in the input tournament. We then move on to study other popular tournament solutions and show that any algorithm for finding the Copeland set, the Slater set, the Markov set, the bipartisan set, the uncovered set, the Banks set, and the top cycle must query Ω(n 2 ) edges in the worst case. On the positive side, we are able to circumvent our strong query complexity lower bound results by proving that, if the size of the top cycle of the input tournament is at most k, then we can find all the tournament solutions mentioned above by querying O(nk + n log n / log(1− 1 / k ) ) edges only.

Recent work on deriving $O(\log T)$ anytime regret bounds for stochastic dueling bandit problems has considered mostly Condorcet winners, which do not always exist, and more recently, winners defined by the Copeland set, which do always exist. In this work, we consider a broad notion of winners defined by tournament solutions in social choice theory, which include the Copeland set as a special case but also include several other notions of winners such as the top cycle, uncovered set, and Banks set, and which, like the Copeland set, always exist. We develop a family of UCB-style dueling bandit algorithms for such general tournament solutions, and show $O(\log T)$ anytime regret bounds for them. Experiments confirm the ability of our algorithms to achieve low regret relative to the target winning set of interest.

A single-elimination (SE) tournament is a popular way to select a winner in both sports competitions and in elections. A natural and well-studied question is the tournament fixing problem (TFP): given the set of all pairwise match outcomes, can a tournament organizer rig an SE tournament by adjusting the initial seeding so that their favorite player wins? We prove new sufficient conditions on the pairwise match outcome information and the favorite player, under which there is guaranteed to be a seeding where the player wins the tournament. Our results greatly generalize previous results. We also investigate the relationship between the set of players that can win an SE tournament under some seeding (so called SE winners) and other traditional tournament solutions. In addition, we generalize and strengthen prior work on probabilistic models for generating tournaments. For instance, we show that every player in an n player tournament generated by the Condorcet Random Model will be an SE winner even when the noise is as small as possible, p = Θ(ln n/n); prior work only had such results for p ≥ Ω( ln n/n). We also establish new results for significantly more general generative models.

In 1990, Thomas Schwartz proposed the conjecture that every nonempty tournament has a unique minimal TEQ-retentive set (TEQ stands for tournament equilibrium set). A weak variant of Schwartz's Conjecture was recently proposed by Felix Brandt. However, both conjectures were disproved very recently by two counterexamples. In this paper, we prove sufficient conditions for infinite classes of tournaments that satisfy Schwartz's Conjecture and Brandt's Conjecture. Moreover, we prove that TEQ can be calculated in polynomial time in several infinite classes of tournaments. Furthermore, our results reveal some structures that are forbidden in every counterexample to Schwartz's Conjecture.

An important subclass of social choice functions, so-called majoritarian (or C1) functions, only take into account the pairwise majority relation between alternatives. In the absence of majority ties--e.g., when there is an odd number of agents with linear preferences--the majority relation is antisymmetric and complete and can thus conveniently be represented by a tournament. Tournaments have a rich mathematical theory and many formal results for majoritarian functions assume that the majority relation constitutes a tournament. Moreover, most majoritarian functions have only been defined for tournaments and allow for a variety of generalizations to unrestricted preference profiles, none of which can be seen as the unequivocal extension of the original function. In this paper, we argue that restricting attention to tournaments is justified by the existence of a conservative extension, which inherits most of the commonly considered properties from its underlying tournament solution.

Tournament solutions, i.e., functions that associate with each complete and asymmetric relation on a set of alternatives a non-empty subset of the alternatives, play an important role within social choice theory and the mathematical social sciences at large. Laffond et al. have shown that various tournament solutions satisfy composition-consistency, a structural invariance property based on the similarity of alternatives. We define the decomposition degree of a tournament as a parameter that reflects its decomposability and show that computing any composition-consistent tournament solution is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the decomposition degree. Furthermore, we experimentally investigate the decomposition degree of two natural distributions of tournaments and its impact on the running time of computing the tournament equilibrium set.