  Information Pursuit (IP) is an explainable prediction algorithm that greedily
selects a sequence of interpretable queries about the data in order of
information gain, updating its posterior at each step based on observed
query-answer pairs. The standard paradigm uses hand-crafted dictionaries of
potential data queries curated by a domain expert or a large language model
after a human prompt. However, in practice, hand-crafted dictionaries are
limited by the expertise of the curator and the heuristics of prompt
engineering. This paper introduces a novel approach: learning a dictionary of
interpretable queries directly from the dataset. Our query dictionary learning
problem is formulated as an optimization problem by augmenting IP's variational
formulation with learnable dictionary parameters. To formulate learnable and
interpretable queries, we leverage the latent space of large vision and
language models like CLIP. To solve the optimization problem, we propose a new
query dictionary learning algorithm inspired by classical sparse dictionary
learning. Our experiments demonstrate that learned dictionaries significantly
outperform hand-crafted dictionaries generated with large language models.
