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Amrit Puhan

Publications and source records attributed to Amrit Puhan.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

SP-Rank: A Dataset for Ranked Preferences with Secondary Information

We introduce $\mathbf{SP-Rank}$, the first large-scale, publicly available dataset for benchmarking algorithms that leverage both first-order preferences and second-order predictions in ranking tasks. Each datapoint includes a personal vote (first-order signal) and a meta-prediction of how others will vote (second-order signal), allowing richer modeling than traditional datasets that capture only individual preferences. SP-Rank contains over 12,000 human-generated datapoints across three domains -- geography, movies, and paintings, and spans nine elicitation formats with varying subset sizes. This structure enables empirical analysis of preference aggregation when expert identities are unknown but presumed to exist, and individual votes represent noisy estimates of a shared ground-truth ranking. We benchmark SP-Rank by comparing traditional aggregation methods that use only first-order votes against SP-Voting, a second-order method that jointly reasons over both signals to infer ground-truth rankings. While SP-Rank also supports models that rely solely on second-order predictions, our benchmarks emphasize the gains from combining both signals. We evaluate performance across three core tasks: (1) full ground-truth rank recovery, (2) subset-level rank recovery, and (3) probabilistic modeling of voter behavior. Results show that incorporating second-order signals substantially improves accuracy over vote-only methods. Beyond social choice, SP-Rank supports downstream applications in learning-to-rank, extracting expert knowledge from noisy crowds, and training reward models in preference-based fine-tuning pipelines. We release the dataset, code, and baseline evaluations (available at https://github.com/amrit19/SP-Rank-Dataset ) to foster research in human preference modeling, aggregation theory, and human-AI alignment.

cs.IR

Surprisingly Popular Voting for Concentric Rank-Order Models

An important problem on social information sites is the recovery of ground truth from individual reports when the experts are in the minority. The wisdom of the crowd, i.e. the collective opinion of a group of individuals fails in such a scenario. However, the surprisingly popular (SP) algorithm~\cite{prelec2017solution} can recover the ground truth even when the experts are in the minority, by asking the individuals to report additional prediction reports--their beliefs about the reports of others. Several recent works have extended the surprisingly popular algorithm to an equivalent voting rule (SP-voting) to recover the ground truth ranking over a set of $m$ alternatives. However, we are yet to fully understand when SP-voting can recover the ground truth ranking, and if so, how many samples (votes and predictions) it needs. We answer this question by proposing two rank-order models and analyzing the sample complexity of SP-voting under these models. In particular, we propose concentric mixtures of Mallows and Plackett-Luce models with $G (\ge 2)$ groups. Our models generalize previously proposed concentric mixtures of Mallows models with $2$ groups, and we highlight the importance of $G > 2$ groups by identifying three distinct groups (expert, intermediate, and non-expert) from existing datasets. Next, we provide conditions on the parameters of the underlying models so that SP-voting can recover ground-truth rankings with high probability, and also derive sample complexities under the same. We complement the theoretical results by evaluating SP-voting on simulated and real datasets.

cs.GT

The Surprising Effectiveness of SP Voting with Partial Preferences

We consider the problem of recovering the ground truth ordering (ranking, top-$k$, or others) over a large number of alternatives. The wisdom of crowd is a heuristic approach based on Condorcet's Jury theorem to address this problem through collective opinions. This approach fails to recover the ground truth when the majority of the crowd is misinformed. The surprisingly popular (SP) algorithm cite{prelec2017solution} is an alternative approach that is able to recover the ground truth even when experts are in minority. The SP algorithm requires the voters to predict other voters' report in the form of a full probability distribution over all rankings of alternatives. However, when the number of alternatives, $m$, is large, eliciting the prediction report or even the vote over $m$ alternatives might be too costly. In this paper, we design a scalable alternative of the SP algorithm which only requires eliciting partial preferences from the voters, and propose new variants of the SP algorithm. In particular, we propose two versions -- Aggregated-SP and Partial-SP -- that ask voters to report vote and prediction on a subset of size $k$ ($\ll m$) in terms of top alternative, partial rank, or an approval set. Through a large-scale crowdsourcing experiment on MTurk, we show that both of our approaches outperform conventional preference aggregation algorithms for the recovery of ground truth rankings, when measured in terms of Kendall-Tau distance and Spearman's $ρ$. We further analyze the collected data and demonstrate that voters' behavior in the experiment, including the minority of the experts, and the SP phenomenon, can be correctly simulated by a concentric mixtures of Mallows model. Finally, we provide theoretical bounds on the sample complexity of SP algorithms with partial rankings to demonstrate the theoretical guarantees of the proposed methods.

cs.GT