arXiv subjects

Pingzhong Tang

Publications and source records attributed to Pingzhong Tang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Deterministic implementation in single-item auctions

Deterministic auctions are attractive in practice due to their transparency, simplicity, and ease of implementation, motivating a sharper understanding of when they can attain the same outcomes as randomized mechanisms. We study deterministic implementation in single-item auctions under two notions of outcomes: (revenue, welfare) pairs and interim allocations. For (revenue, welfare) pairs, we show a separation in discrete settings: there exists a pair implementable by a deterministic Bayesian incentive-compatible (BIC) auction but not by any deterministic dominant-strategy incentive-compatible (DSIC) auction. For continuous atomless priors, we identify conditions under which deterministic DSIC auctions are equivalent to randomized BIC auctions in terms of achievable outcomes. For interim allocations, under a strict monotonicity condition, we establish a deterministic analogue of Border's theorem for two bidders, providing a necessary and sufficient condition for deterministic DSIC implementability. Using this characterization, we exhibit an interim allocation implementable by a randomized BIC auction but not by any deterministic DSIC auction.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2024

Try-On-Adapter: A Simple and Flexible Try-On Paradigm

Image-based virtual try-on, widely used in online shopping, aims to generate images of a naturally dressed person conditioned on certain garments, providing significant research and commercial potential. A key challenge of try-on is to generate realistic images of the model wearing the garments while preserving the details of the garments. Previous methods focus on masking certain parts of the original model's standing image, and then inpainting on masked areas to generate realistic images of the model wearing corresponding reference garments, which treat the try-on task as an inpainting task. However, such implements require the user to provide a complete, high-quality standing image, which is user-unfriendly in practical applications. In this paper, we propose Try-On-Adapter (TOA), an outpainting paradigm that differs from the existing inpainting paradigm. Our TOA can preserve the given face and garment, naturally imagine the rest parts of the image, and provide flexible control ability with various conditions, e.g., garment properties and human pose. In the experiments, TOA shows excellent performance on the virtual try-on task even given relatively low-quality face and garment images in qualitative comparisons. Additionally, TOA achieves the state-of-the-art performance of FID scores 5.56 and 7.23 for paired and unpaired on the VITON-HD dataset in quantitative comparisons.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Price Competition in Linear Fisher Markets: Stability, Equilibrium and Personalization

Linear Fisher market is one of the most fundamental economic models. The market is traditionally examined on the basis of individual's price-taking behavior. However, this assumption breaks in markets such as online advertising and e-commerce, where several oligopolists dominate the market and are able to compete with each other via strategic actions. Motivated by this, we study the price competition among sellers in linear Fisher markets. From an algorithmic game-theoretic perspective, we establish a model to analyze behaviors of buyers and sellers that are driven by utility-maximizing purposes and also constrained by computational tractability. The main economic observation is the role played by personalization: the classic benchmark market outcome, namely competitive equilibrium, remains to be a steady-state if every buyer must be treated "equally"; however, sellers have the incentive to personalize, and as a result the market would become more unpredictable and less efficient. In addition, we build a series of algorithmic and complexity results along the road to justify our modeling choices and reveal market structures. We find interesting connections between our model and other computational problems such as stable matching, network flow, etc. We believe these results and techniques are of independent interest.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2024

Proportional Dynamics in Linear Fisher Markets with Auto-bidding: Convergence, Incentives and Fairness

Proportional dynamics, originated from peer-to-peer file sharing systems, models a decentralized price-learning process in Fisher markets. Previously, items in the dynamics operate independently of one another, and each is assumed to belong to a different seller. In this paper, we show how it can be generalized to the setting where each seller brings multiple items and buyers allocate budgets at the granularity of sellers rather than individual items. The generalized dynamics consistently converges to the competitive equilibrium, and interestingly relates to the auto-bidding paradigm currently popular in online advertising auction markets. In contrast to peer-to-peer networks, the proportional rule is not imposed as a protocol in auto-bidding markets. Regarding this incentive concern, we show that buyers have a strong tendency to follow the rule, but it is easy for sellers to profitably deviate (given buyers' commitment to the rule). Based on this observation, we further study the seller-side deviation game and show that it admits a unique pure Nash equilibrium. Though it is generally different from the competitive equilibrium, we show that it attains a good fairness guarantee as long as the market is competitive enough and not severely monopolized.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2023

A Strategy-proof Mechanism For Networked Housing Markets

This paper studies a house allocation problem in a networked housing market, where agents can invite others to join the system in order to enrich their options. Top Trading Cycle is a well-known matching mechanism that achieves a set of desirable properties in a market without invitations. However, under a tree-structured networked market, existing agents have to strategically propagate the barter market as their invitees may compete in the same house with them. Our impossibility result shows that TTC cannot work properly in a networked housing market. Hence, we characterize the possible competitions between inviters and invitees, which lead agents to fail to refer others truthfully (strategy-proof). We then present a novel mechanism based on TTC, avoiding the aforementioned competition to ensure all agents report preference and propagate the barter market truthfully. Unlike the existing mechanisms, the agents' preferences are less restricted under our mechanism. Furthermore, we show by simulations that our mechanism outperforms the existing matching mechanisms in terms of the number of swaps and agents' satisfaction.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2023

Sequential Persuasion Using Limited Experiments

Bayesian persuasion and its derived information design problem has been one of the main research agendas in the economics and computation literature over the past decade. However, when attempting to apply its model and theory, one is often limited by the fact that the sender can only implement very restricted information structures. Moreover, in this case, the sender can possibly achieve higher expected utility by performing a sequence of feasible experiments, where the choice of each experiment depends on the outcomes of all previous experiments. Indeed, it has been well observed that real life persuasions often take place in rounds during which the sender exhibits experiments/arguments sequentially. We study the sender's expected utility maximization using finite and infinite sequences of experiments. For infinite sequences of experiments, we characterize the supremum of the sender's expected utility using a function that generalizes the concave closure definition in the standard Bayesian persuasion problem. With this characterization, we first study a special case where the sender can use feasible experiments to achieve the optimal expected utility of the standard Bayesian persuasion without feasibility constraints, which is a trivial utility upper bound, and establish structural findings about the sender's optimal sequential design in this case. Then we derive conditions under which the sender's optimal sequential design exists; when an optimal sequential design exists, there exists an optimal design that is Markovian, i.e., the choice of the next experiment only depends on the receiver's current belief.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2023

A Truthful Referral Auction Over Networks

This paper studies a mechanism design problem over a network, where agents can only participate by referrals. The Bulow-Klemberer theorem proposes that expanding the number of participants is a more effective approach to increase revenue than modifying the auction format. However, agents lack the motivation to invite others because doing so intensifies competition among them. On the other hand, misreporting social networks is also a common problem that can reduce revenue. Examples of misreporting include Sybil attacks (an agent pretending to be multiple bidders) and coalition groups (multiple agents pretending to be an agent). To address these challenges, we introduce a novel mechanism called the Truthful Referral Diffusion Mechanism (TRDM). TRDM incentivizes agents to report their social networks truthfully, and some of them are rewarded by the seller for improving revenue. In spite of the fact that some agents overbid in TRDM, the revenue is fixed, and it is higher than the revenue of any mechanism without referrals. TRDM is budget-balanced (non-negative revenue) and generates an efficient outcome (maximized social welfare), making it attractive for both the seller and the buyers as it improves revenue and reward.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2023

Collusion-proof And Sybil-proof Reward Mechanisms For Query Incentive Networks

This paper explores reward mechanisms for a query incentive network in which agents seek information from social networks. In a query tree issued by the task owner, each agent is rewarded by the owner for contributing to the solution, for instance, solving the task or inviting others to solve it. The reward mechanism determines the reward for each agent and motivates all agents to propagate and report their information truthfully. In particular, the reward cannot exceed the budget set by the task owner. However, our impossibility results demonstrate that a reward mechanism cannot simultaneously achieve Sybil-proof (agents benefit from manipulating multiple fake identities), collusion-proof (multiple agents pretend as a single agent to improve the reward), and other essential properties. In order to address these issues, we propose two novel reward mechanisms. The first mechanism achieves Sybil-proof and collusion-proof, respectively; the second mechanism sacrifices Sybil-proof to achieve the approximate versions of Sybil-proof and collusion-proof. Additionally, we show experimentally that our second reward mechanism outperforms the existing ones.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2022

Vulnerabilities of Single-Round Incentive Compatibility in Auto-bidding: Theory and Evidence from ROI-Constrained Online Advertising Markets

Most of the work in the auction design literature assumes that bidders behave rationally based on the information available for every individual auction, and the revelation principle enables designers to restrict their efforts to incentive compatible (IC) mechanisms. However, in today's online advertising markets, one of the most important real-life applications of auction design, the data and computational power required to bid optimally are only available to the platform, and an advertiser can only participate by setting performance objectives and constraints for its proxy auto-bidder provided by the platform. The prevalence of auto-bidding necessitates a review of auction theory. In this paper, we examine the markets through the lens of ROI-constrained value-maximizing campaigns. We show that second price auction exhibits many undesirable properties (computational hardness, non-monotonicity, instability of bidders' utilities, and interference in A/B testing) and loses its dominant theoretical advantages in single-item scenarios. In addition, we make it clear how IC and its runner-up-winner interdependence contribute to each property. We hope that our work could bring new perspectives to the community and benefit practitioners to attain a better grasp of real-world markets.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2022

Optimal Anonymous Independent Reward Scheme Design

We consider designing reward schemes that incentivize agents to create high-quality content (e.g., videos, images, text, ideas). The problem is at the center of a real-world application where the goal is to optimize the overall quality of generated content on user-generated content platforms. We focus on anonymous independent reward schemes (AIRS) that only take the quality of an agent's content as input. We prove the general problem is NP-hard. If the cost function is convex, we show the optimal AIRS can be formulated as a convex optimization problem and propose an efficient algorithm to solve it. Next, we explore the optimal linear reward scheme and prove it has a 1/2-approximation ratio, and the ratio is tight. Lastly, we show the proportional scheme can be arbitrarily bad compared to AIRS.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2022

Characterization of Incentive Compatibility of an Ex-Ante Constrained Player

We consider a variant of the standard Bayesian mechanism, where players evaluate their outcomes and constraints in an ex-ante manner. Such a model captures a major form of modern online advertising where an advertiser is concerned with her/his expected utility over a time period and her/his type may change over time. We are interested in the incentive compatibility (IC) problem of such Bayesian mechanism. Under very mild conditions on the mechanism environments, we give a full characterization of IC via the taxation principle and show, perhaps surprisingly, that such IC mechanisms are fully characterized by the so-called auto-bidding mechanisms, which are pervasively fielded in the online advertising industry.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2021

Coalitional Permutation Manipulations in the Gale-Shapley Algorithm

In this paper, we consider permutation manipulations by any subset of women in the men-proposing version of the Gale-Shapley algorithm. This paper is motivated by the college admissions process in China. Our results also answer an open problem on what can be achieved by permutation manipulations. We present an efficient algorithm to find a strategy profile such that the induced matching is stable and Pareto-optimal (in the set of all achievable stable matchings) while the strategy profile itself is inconspicuous. Surprisingly, we show that such a strategy profile actually forms a Nash equilibrium of the manipulation game. In the end, we show that it is NP-complete to find a manipulation that is strictly better for all members of the coalition. This result demonstrates a sharp contrast between weakly better off outcomes and strictly better-off outcomes.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2021

SEIHAI: A Sample-efficient Hierarchical AI for the MineRL Competition

The MineRL competition is designed for the development of reinforcement learning and imitation learning algorithms that can efficiently leverage human demonstrations to drastically reduce the number of environment interactions needed to solve the complex \emph{ObtainDiamond} task with sparse rewards. To address the challenge, in this paper, we present \textbf{SEIHAI}, a \textbf{S}ample-\textbf{e}ff\textbf{i}cient \textbf{H}ierarchical \textbf{AI}, that fully takes advantage of the human demonstrations and the task structure. Specifically, we split the task into several sequentially dependent subtasks, and train a suitable agent for each subtask using reinforcement learning and imitation learning. We further design a scheduler to select different agents for different subtasks automatically. SEIHAI takes the first place in the preliminary and final of the NeurIPS-2020 MineRL competition.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Automated Mechanism Design via Neural Networks

Using AI approaches to automatically design mechanisms has been a central research mission at the interface of AI and economics [Conitzer and Sandholm, 2002]. Previous approaches that attempt to design revenue optimal auctions for the multi-dimensional settings fall short in at least one of the three aspects: 1) representation -- search in a space that probably does not even contain the optimal mechanism; 2) exactness -- finding a mechanism that is either not truthful or far from optimal; 3) domain dependence -- need a different design for different environment settings. To resolve the three difficulties, in this paper, we put forward -- MenuNet -- a unified neural network based framework that automatically learns to design revenue optimal mechanisms. Our framework consists of a mechanism network that takes an input distribution for training and outputs a mechanism, as well as a buyer network that takes a mechanism as input and output an action. Such a separation in design mitigates the difficulty to impose incentive compatibility constraints on the mechanism, by making it a rational choice of the buyer. As a result, our framework easily overcomes the previously mentioned difficulty in incorporating IC constraints and always returns exactly incentive compatible mechanisms. We then apply our framework to a number of multi-item revenue optimal design settings, for a few of which the theoretically optimal mechanisms are unknown. We then go on to theoretically prove that the mechanisms found by our framework are indeed optimal. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to apply neural networks to discover optimal auction mechanisms with provable optimality.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

DoubleEnsemble: A New Ensemble Method Based on Sample Reweighting and Feature Selection for Financial Data Analysis

Modern machine learning models (such as deep neural networks and boosting decision tree models) have become increasingly popular in financial market prediction, due to their superior capacity to extract complex non-linear patterns. However, since financial datasets have very low signal-to-noise ratio and are non-stationary, complex models are often very prone to overfitting and suffer from instability issues. Moreover, as various machine learning and data mining tools become more widely used in quantitative trading, many trading firms have been producing an increasing number of features (aka factors). Therefore, how to automatically select effective features becomes an imminent problem. To address these issues, we propose DoubleEnsemble, an ensemble framework leveraging learning trajectory based sample reweighting and shuffling based feature selection. Specifically, we identify the key samples based on the training dynamics on each sample and elicit key features based on the ablation impact of each feature via shuffling. Our model is applicable to a wide range of base models, capable of extracting complex patterns, while mitigating the overfitting and instability issues for financial market prediction. We conduct extensive experiments, including price prediction for cryptocurrencies and stock trading, using both DNN and gradient boosting decision tree as base models. Our experiment results demonstrate that DoubleEnsemble achieves a superior performance compared with several baseline methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

New Complexity Results on Coalitional Manipulation of Borda

The Borda voting rule is a positional scoring rule for $z$ candidates such that in each vote, the first candidate receives $z-1$ points, the second $z-2$ points and so on. The winner in the Borda rule is the candidate with highest total score. We study the manipulation problem of the Borda rule in a setting with two non-manipulators while one of the non-manipulator's vote is weighted. We demonstrate a sharp contrast on computational complexity depending on the weight of the non-manipulator: the problem is NP-hard when the weight is larger than $1$ while there exists an efficient algorithm to find a manipulation when the weight is at most $1$.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2020

Mechanism Design for Multi-Party Machine Learning

In a multi-party machine learning system, different parties cooperate on optimizing towards better models by sharing data in a privacy-preserving way. A major challenge in learning is the incentive issue. For example, if there is competition among the parties, one may strategically hide his data to prevent other parties from getting better models. In this paper, we study the problem through the lens of mechanism design and incorporate the features of multi-party learning in our setting. First, each agent's valuation has externalities that depend on others' types and actions. Second, each agent can only misreport a type lower than his true type, but not the other way round. We call this setting interdependent value with type-dependent action spaces. We provide the optimal truthful mechanism in the quasi-monotone utility setting. We also provide necessary and sufficient conditions for truthful mechanisms in the most general case. Finally, we show the existence of such mechanisms is highly affected by the market growth rate and provide empirical analysis.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2020

Characterization of Group-Strategyproof Mechanisms for Facility Location in Strictly Convex Space

We characterize the class of group-strategyproof mechanisms for the single facility location game in any unconstrained strictly convex space. A mechanism is \emph{group-strategyproof}, if no group of agents can misreport so that all its members are \emph{strictly} better off. A strictly convex space is a normed vector space where $\|x+y\|<2$ holds for any pair of different unit vectors $x \neq y$, e.g., any $L_p$ space with $p\in (1,\infty)$. We show that any deterministic, unanimous, group-strategyproof mechanism must be dictatorial, and that any randomized, unanimous, translation-invariant, group-strategyproof mechanism must be \emph{2-dictatorial}. Here a randomized mechanism is 2-dictatorial if the lottery output of the mechanism must be distributed on the line segment between two dictators' inputs. A mechanism is translation-invariant if the output of the mechanism follows the same translation of the input. Our characterization directly implies that any (randomized) translation-invariant approximation algorithm satisfying the group-strategyproofness property has a lower bound of $2$-approximation for maximum cost (whenever $n \geq 3$), and $n/2 - 1$ for social cost. We also find an algorithm that $2$-approximates the maximum cost and $n/2$-approximates the social cost, proving the bounds to be (almost) tight.

cs.GT↗