Efficiently eliciting preferences from a group of users

Learning about users' preferences allows agents to make intelligent decisions on behalf of users. When we are eliciting preferences from a group of users, we can use the preferences of the users we have already processed to increase the efficiency of the elicitation process for the remaining users. However, current methods either require strong prior knowledge about the users' preferences or can be overly cautious and inefficient. Our method, based on standard techniques from non-parametric statistics, allows the controller to choose a balance between prior knowledge and efficiency. This balance is investigated through experimental results.