# Hard Rules, Soft Preferences: Bridging Reasoning, Learning, and Optimization for Personalized Packing Checklist Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15562 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15562/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in LLM reasoning for recommendation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 1 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [LLM reasoning for recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/llm-reasoning-for-recommendation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Multi-tiered Solution for Personalized Baggage Item Recommendations using FastText and Association Rule Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09359/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Packing for air travel is recurring and error-prone: the checklist must be personal and context-aware, yet feasible under safety rules, item dependencies, and luggage limits. Existing packing assistants are template-driven and generic, or recommendation-driven but unconstrained, leaving users to manually patch regulatory and capacity violations. We propose a reasoning-guided learning framework with three stages: (1) a symbolic engine that generates a regulation-aware seed checklist with explicit dependency structure, (2) a two-stage preference learner that estimates inclusion and priority utilities from user add and remove actions while mitigating survivorship bias, and (3) a CP-SAT optimizer that selects a compact, compliant subset. The architecture instantiates a general pattern for constrained personalization, applicable wherever hard feasibility coexists with sparse preference signals. On 604 labeled trip scenarios, comprising 29K inclusion labels and 343K pairwise comparisons, the symbolic engine attains 99.7% recall and 0.96 rubric validity, compared with 0.78 to 0.81 for frontier LLMs. Gradient-boosted trees and LambdaMART reach an AUC-ROC of 0.943 and an NDCG@5 of 0.923. CP-SAT attains 100% constraint satisfaction, compared with 28% for greedy selection and 10% for random selection. Deployment in FlyEnJoy, a production iOS travel app, doubled checklist completions and reduced editing and completion time.