Soft Tournament Equilibrium: Differentiable Set-Valued Inference for Non-Transitive Pairwise Comparisons
Soft Tournament Equilibrium (STE) is a differentiable layer for Top-Cycle (TC) and Uncovered-Set (UC) inference from reciprocal pair probabilities. Normalized log-sum-exp reachability and covering give smooth scores with approximation, perturbation, and margin-recovery bounds. We distinguish structural supervision, posterior uncertainty, and the final set decision through controlled synthetic studies and reconstruction of recorded ordinal profiles. Matched-epoch training improves F1 under a common structural readout, but a separate equal-budget soft-UC comparison does not demonstrate an advantage. A prospective equal-budget hard-UC study improves selective F1 at 24 alternatives from 0.632...
| Authors | Saad Alqithami |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 6 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 October 2026 |
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