Characterizing Necessary Losers to Explain Tournaments Solutions
We study the problem of formally explaining why a candidate was not selected by a given tournament rule, by identifying sub-tournaments in which the candidate loses independently of how the rest of the tournament is completed. We define destructive minimal supports as any minimal sub-tournament satisfying this property, which in formal explainable artificial intelligence corresponds to abductive explanations for the question "Why does the loser lose the tournament?". For six common tournament solutions (maximin, uncovered set and its weighted variant, top cycle, Copeland, and Borda) we provide characterizations of when a candidate is either a necessary loser or a possible winner, we deter...
| Authors | Contet Clément, Umberto Grandi, Jérôme Mengin |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 24 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 August 2026 |
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