Abstract

Bayesian approaches to preference elicitation (PE) are particularly attractive due to their ability to explicitly model uncertainty in users’ latent utility functions. However, previous approaches to Bayesian PE have ignored the important problem of generalizing from previous users to an unseen user in order to reduce the elicitation burden on new users. In this paper, we address this deficiency by introducing a Gaussian Process (GP) prior over users’ latent utility functions on the joint space of user and item features. We learn the hyper-parameters of this GP on a set of preferences of previous users and use it to aid in the elicitation process for a new user. This approach provides a flexible model of a multi-user utility function, facilitates an efficient value of information (VOI) heuristic query selection strategy, and provides a principled way to incorporate the elicitations of multiple users back into the model. We show the effectiveness of our method in comparison to previous work on a real dataset of user preferences over sushi types.