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Qi Qi

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42 papers
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42

TCS Journal 2026 Journal Article

Computations and complexities of Tarski’s fixed points and supermodular games

  • Chuangyin Dang
  • Qi Qi
  • Yinyu Ye

We consider two models of computation for Tarski's order preserving function f related to fixed points in a complete lattice: the oracle function model and the polynomial function model. In both models, we find the first polynomial time algorithm for finding a Tarski's fixed point. In addition, we provide a matching oracle bound for determining the uniqueness in the oracle function model and prove it is Co-NP hard in the polynomial function model. The existence of the pure Nash equilibrium in supermodular games is proved by Tarski's fixed point theorem. Exploring the difference between supermodular games and Tarski's fixed point, we also develop the computational results for finding one pure Nash equilibrium and determining the uniqueness of the equilibrium in supermodular games.

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

SACO: Sequence-Aware Constrained Optimization Framework for Coupon Distribution in E-commerce

  • Li Kong
  • Bingzhe Wang
  • Zhou Chen
  • Suhan Hu
  • Yuchao Ma
  • Qi Qi
  • Suoyuan Song
  • Bicheng Jin

Coupon distribution is a critical marketing strategy used by online platforms to boost revenue and enhance user engagement. Regrettably, existing coupon distribution strategies fall far short of effectively leveraging the complex sequential interactions between platforms and users. This critical oversight, despite the abundance of e-commerce log data, has precipitated a performance plateau. In this paper, we focus on the scene that the platforms make sequential coupon distribution decision multiple times for various users, with each user interacting with the platform repeatedly. Based on this marketing scenario, we propose a novel marketing framework, named Sequence-Aware Constrained Optimization (SACO) framework, to directly devise coupon distribution policy for long-term revenue boosting. SACO framework enables optimized online decision-making in a variety of real-world marketing scenarios. It achieves this by seamlessly integrating three key characteristics, general scenarios, sequential modeling with more comprehensive historical data, and efficient iterative updates within a unified framework. Furthermore, empirical results on real-world industrial dataset, alongside public and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework.

IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

A³-Net: Calibration-Free Multi-View 3D Hand Reconstruction for Enhanced Musical Instrument Learning

  • Geng Chen
  • Xufeng Jian
  • Yuchen Chen
  • Pengfei Ren
  • Jingyu Wang
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Qi Qi
  • Jing Wang

Precise 3D hand posture is essential for learning musical instruments. Reconstructing highly precise 3D hand gestures enables learners to correct and master proper techniques through 3D simulation and Extended Reality. However, exsiting methods typically rely on precisely calibrated multi-camera systems, which are not easily deployable in everyday environments. In this paper, we focus on calibration-free multi-view 3D hand reconstruction in unconstrained scenarios. Establishing correspondences between multi-view images is particularly challenging without camera extrinsics. To address this, we propose A^3-Net, a multi-level alignment framework that utilizes 3D structural representations with hierarchical geometric and explicit semantic information as alignment proxies, facilitating multi-view feature interaction in both 3D geometric space and 2D visual space. Specifically, we first perfrom global geometric alignment to map multi-view features into a canonical space. Subsequently, we aggregate information into predefined sparse and dense proxies to further integrate cross-view semantics through mutual interaction. Finnaly, we perfrom 2D alignment to align projected 2D visual features with 2D observations. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in the multi-view 3D hand reconstruction task, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Beyond Last-Click: An Optimal Mechanism for Ad Attribution

  • Nan An
  • Weian Li
  • Qi Qi
  • Changyuan Yu
  • Liang Zhang

Accurate attribution for multiple platforms is critical for evaluating performance-based advertising. However, existing attribution methods rely heavily on the heuristic methods, e. g. , Last-Click Mechanism (LCM) which always allocates the attribution to the platform with the latest report, lacking theoretical guarantees for attribution accuracy. In this work, we propose a novel theoretical model for the advertising attribution problem, in which we aim to design the optimal dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) mechanisms and evaluate their performance. We first show that LCM is not DSIC and performs poorly in terms of accuracy and fairness. To address this limitation, we introduce the Peer-Validated Mechanism (PVM), a DSIC mechanism in which a platform's attribution depends solely on the reports of other platforms. We then examine the accuracy of PVM across both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings, and provide provable accuracy bounds for each case. Notably, we show that PVM is the optimal DSIC mechanism in the homogeneous setting. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to show that PVM consistently outperforms LCM in terms of attribution accuracy and fairness.

IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Beyond Statistical Analysis: Multimodal Framework for Time Series Forecasting with LLM-Driven Temporal Pattern

  • Jiahong Xiong
  • Chengsen Wang
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Yuhan Jing
  • Qi Qi
  • Zirui Zhuang
  • Lei Zhang
  • Jianxin Liao

Accurate forecasting of time series is crucial for many applications in the real world. Conventional methods primarily rely on statistical analysis of historical data, often leading to overfitting and failing to account for background information and constraints imposed by external events. Therefore, introducing large language models (LLMs) with robust textual capabilities holds significant potential. However, due to the inherent limitations of LLMs in handling numerical data, they do not exhibit advantages in precise numerical prediction tasks. Therefore, we propose a framework to integrate LLMs with conventional methods synergistically. Rather than directly outputting numerical predictions, we leverage the capabilities of the LLMs to generate textual temporal patterns, thereby fully utilizing their inherent knowledge and reasoning abilities. Additionally, we introduce a memory network designed to decode these textual representations into a format that numerical models can effectively interpret. This approach not only capitalizes on the strengths of the LLM in text processing but also bridges the gap between textual and numerical data, enhancing the overall predictive performance of the model. Our experimental results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art performance on various benchmark datasets.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

ChatTime: A Unified Multimodal Time Series Foundation Model Bridging Numerical and Textual Data

  • Chengsen Wang
  • Qi Qi
  • Jingyu Wang
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Zirui Zhuang
  • Jinming Wu
  • Lei Zhang
  • Jianxin Liao

Human experts typically integrate numerical and textual multimodal information to analyze time series. However, most traditional deep learning predictors rely solely on unimodal numerical data, using a fixed-length window for training and prediction on a single dataset, and cannot adapt to different scenarios. The powered pre-trained large language model has introduced new opportunities for time series analysis. Yet, existing methods are either inefficient in training, incapable of handling textual information, or lack zero-shot forecasting capability. In this paper, we innovatively model time series as a foreign language and construct ChatTime, a unified framework for time series and text processing. As an out-of-the-box multimodal time series foundation model, ChatTime provides zero-shot forecasting capability and supports bimodal input/output for both time series and text. We design a series of experiments to verify the superior performance of ChatTime across multiple tasks and scenarios, and create four multimodal datasets to address data gaps. The experimental results demonstrate the potential and utility of ChatTime.

I&C Journal 2025 Journal Article

Competition among parallel contests

  • Xiaotie Deng
  • Ningyuan Li
  • Weian Li
  • Qi Qi

We investigate the model of multiple rank-order contests held in parallel, where each contestant only selects one contest to join and each contest designer decides the prize structure to compete for the participation of contestants. We first analyze the strategic behaviors of contestants and completely characterize the symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibrium. As for the strategies of contest designers, when other designers' strategies are known, we show that computing the best response is NP-hard and propose a fully polynomial time approximation scheme to output the ϵ-approximate best response. When other designers' strategies are unknown, we provide a worst-case analysis on one designer's strategy. We give an upper bound on the worst-case utility of any strategy and propose a method to construct a strategy whose utility can guarantee a constant ratio of this upper bound in the worst case.

JBHI Journal 2025 Journal Article

DA-META: A Dual Attention Meta-Learning Framework for Unsupervised Motor Imagery Decoding

  • Jianhang Liu
  • Mingai Li
  • Zhi Li
  • Yufei Yang
  • Qi Qi

Motor imagery electroencephalography (MI-EEG) decoding demonstrates significant potential for paralysis rehabilitation, and its generalization capability is often compromised by intersubject variability and scarcity of labeled target domain data. Meta-learning has emerged as a promising approach for unsupervised domain adaptation problem. However, existing implementations suffer from two critical limitations: insufficient feature extraction and overlooking the guiding role of unlabeled target data. To overcome these challenges, we propose a dual-attention meta-learning framework (DA-META) with model-agnostic architecture in this paper. The framework comprises three stages: meta-task construction, guided meta-training, and fine-tuning-free meta-testing. In the guided meta-training stage, DA-META incorporates two key attention mechanisms: an enhanced temporal attention module for effective feature extraction, and a cosine similarity-based attention module to leverage the guidance of target domain. Using EEGNet as the backbone network, DA-META achieves mean classification accuracies of 68. 04% and 76. 61% on self-collected datasets from patients and healthy subjects, and 73. 29% and 80. 93% on the public BCI Competition IV 2a and 2b datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. When employing EEGNet, DeepConvNet, and EEG Conformer as backbone networks respectively, the framework achieves accuracy improvements of 5. 17%, 2. 56%, and 0. 85% on the 2a dataset, compared to the baseline. These results demonstrate the framework's superior ability to handle inter-subject variability and its significant potential to improve practical applicability.

IROS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Distributed Cooperative Target Tracking and Active Sensing of Dual-AUV Based on Flank Array Sonar Detection

  • Qi Qi
  • Tao Chen
  • Yiming Jiang 0022
  • Yanjie Pan

When tracking underwater target, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) need to estimate the target state based on the information detected by sensors and plan their own tracking paths accordingly to achieve active sensing of the target. When the sensor equipped on the AUV is a flank array sonar, the problem becomes significantly more complex due to the limited field of view (FOV) of the sonar and the fact that bearing-only information is available for observation. To address this issue, this paper proposes a distributed solution for cooperative tracking and active sensing using dual-AUV systems equipped with flank array sonar for detection. Based on the analysis of underwater acoustic communication modes in dual-AUV systems, this study decomposes the problem into two aspects: cooperative estimation and planning control for active sensing. Corresponding algorithms are proposed and their effectiveness is verified.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Do LVLMs Truly Understand Video Anomalies? Revealing Hallucination via Co-Occurrence Patterns

  • Menghao Zhang
  • Huazheng Wang
  • Pengfei Ren
  • Kangheng Lin
  • Qi Qi
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Zirui Zhuang
  • Lei Zhang

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) pretrained on large-scale multimodal data have shown promising capabilities in Video Anomaly Detection (VAD). However, their ability to reason about abnormal events based on scene semantics remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate LVLMs’ behavior in VAD from a visual-textual co-occurrence perspective, focusing on whether their decisions are driven by statistical shortcuts between visual instances and textual phrases. By analyzing visual-textual co-occurrence in pretraining data and conducting experiments under different data settings, we reveal a hallucination phenomenon: LVLMs tend to rely on co-occurrence patterns between visual instances and textual phrases associated with either normality or abnormality, leading to incorrect predictions when these high-frequency objects appear in semantically mismatched contexts. To address this issue, we propose VAD-DPO, a direct preference optimization method supervised with counter-example pairs. By constructing visually similar but semantically contrasting video clips, VAD-DPO encourages the model to align its predictions with the semantics of scene rather than relying on co-occurrence patterns. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of VAD-DPO in enhancing both anomaly detection and reasoning performance, particularly in scene-dependent scenarios.

IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Efficient Inter-Operator Scheduling for Concurrent Recommendation Model Inference on GPU

  • Shuxi Guo
  • Zikang Xu
  • Jiahao Liu
  • Jinyi Zhang
  • Qi Qi
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Jun Huang
  • Jianxin Liao

Deep learning-based recommendation systems are increasingly important in the industry. To meet strict SLA requirements, serving frameworks must efficiently handle concurrent queries. However, current serving systems fail to serve concurrent queries due to the following problems: (1) inefficient operator (op) scheduling due to the query-wise op launching mechanism, and (2) heavy contention caused by the mutable nature of recommendation model inference. This paper presents RecOS, a system designed to optimize concurrent recommendation model inference on GPUs. RecOS efficiently schedules ops from different queries by monitoring GPU workloads and assigning ops to the most suitable streams. This approach reduces contention and enhances inference efficiency by leveraging inter-op parallelism and op characteristics. To maintain correctness across multiple CUDA streams, RecOS introduces a unified asynchronous tensor management mechanism. Evaluations demonstrate that RecOS improves online service performance, reducing latency by up to 68%.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

GenAuction: A Generative Auction for Online Advertising

  • Yuchao Ma
  • Ruohan Qian
  • Bingzhe Wang
  • Qi Qi
  • Wenqiang Liu
  • Qian Tang
  • Zhao Shen
  • Wei Zhong

Previous ad auctions predominantly relied on rule-based mechanisms, which selected winning advertisements (ads) at the ad-level and subsequently combined them into page views (PVs), leading to suboptimal allocations in multi-round auctions. This limitation stems from the significant computational burden required to design ranking score rules and select winning ad sets, as well as the inability to fully capture contextual information within PVs during ad-level selection. In this paper, we propose a key-performance-indicator (KPI) based auction mechanism that selects winning PVs at the PV-level, modeling the ad allocation as a constrained optimization problem. This approach enables us to address both short-term and long-term KPIs while leveraging the comprehensive contextual information available within PVs. Based on this framework, we design GenAuction, a generative auction mechanism utilizing a Generator-Evaluator architecture powered by Transformer algorithms. The Generator swiftly generates multiple candidate PVs, while the Evaluator selects the optimal PVs based on contextual information, adhering to the objectives and KPIs of multi-round auctions. We conduct extensive experiments using real-world data and online A/B tests to validate that GenAuction efficiently handles multi-objective allocation tasks, demonstrating its efficacy and potential for real-world application.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Generalizable Hand-Object Modeling from Monocular RGB Images via 3D Gaussians

  • Xingyu Liu
  • Pengfei Ren
  • Qi Qi
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Zirui Zhuang
  • Jing Wang
  • Jianxin Liao
  • Jingyu Wang

Recent advances in hand-object interaction modeling have employed implicit representations, such as Signed Distance Functions (SDF) and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to reconstruct hands and objects with arbitrary topology and photo-realistic detail. However, these methods often rely on dense 3D surface annotations, or are tailored to short clips constrained in motion trajectories and scene contexts, limiting their generalization to diverse environments and movement patterns. In this work, we present HOGS, an adaptively perceptive 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework for generalizable hand-object modeling from unconstrained monocular RGB images. By integrating photometric cues from the visual modality with the physically grounded structure of 3D Gaussians, HOGS disentangles inherent geometry from transient lighting and motion-induced appearance changes. This endows hand-object assets with the ability to generalize to unseen environments and dynamic motion patterns. Experiments on two challenging datasets demonstrate that HOGS outperforms state-of-the-art methods in monocular hand-object reconstruction and photo-realistic rendering.

TCS Journal 2025 Journal Article

Joint bidding in ad auctions

  • Yuchao Ma
  • Weian Li
  • Wanzhi Zhang
  • Yahui Lei
  • Zhicheng Zhang
  • Qi Qi
  • Qiang Liu
  • Xingxing Wang

In traditional advertising auctions, commodity suppliers as advertisers compete for adverting positions to display commodities. As e-commerce platforms become more prevalent, offline retailers are also opening online virtual shops, and retailers are starting to pay a fee for extra exposure of their shops. This has led to situations where a single commodity may be sponsored by both the retailer and the supplier, offering opportunities for more profit. In order to explore this novel advertising pattern, we propose a new model called the joint advertising system (JAS), where retailers and suppliers jointly bid for advertising positions. In the context of this realistic scenario, conventional mechanisms such as GFP, GSP and Myerson auction cannot be applied directly. Besides, the VCG mechanism results in negative revenue in JAS. To solve this issue, we modify the payment rule of VCG to create a revised VCG mechanism that guarantees incentive compatible, individually rational and weakly budget-balanced. Additionally, we leverage the structure of the affine maximizer auction (AMA) and the technique of automated mechanism design to train joint AMA. Finally, we conduct several experiments to demonstrate the performance of the joint AMA. It turns out that our mechanism maintains good economic properties and outperforms other mechanisms in various settings.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Merging Mechanisms for Ads and Organic Items in E-commerce Platforms

  • Nan An
  • Weian Li
  • Qi Qi
  • Liang Zhang

In contemporary e-commerce platforms, search result pages display two types of items: ad items and organic items. Ad items are determined through an advertising auction system, while organic items are selected by a recommendation system. These systems have distinct optimization objectives, creating the challenge of effectively merging these two components. Recent research has explored merging mechanisms for e-commerce platforms, but none have simultaneously achieved all desirable properties: incentive compatibility, individual rationality, adaptability to multiple slots, integration of inseparable candidates, and avoidance of repeated exposure for ads and organic items. This paper addresses the design of a merging mechanism that satisfies all these properties. We first provide the necessary conditions for the optimal merging mechanisms. Next, we introduce two simple and effective mechanisms, termed the generalized fix mechanism and the generalized change mechanism. Finally, we theoretically prove that both mechanisms offer guaranteed approximation ratios compared to the optimal mechanism in both simplest and general settings.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

On Designing the Optimal Integrated Ad Auction in E-commerce Platforms

  • Yuchao Ma
  • Weian Li
  • Yuhan Wang
  • Zitian Guo
  • Yuejia Dou
  • Qi Qi
  • Changyuan Yu

Currently, e-commerce platforms integrate ads and organic content into a mixed list for users. While platforms seek to maximize profit from advertisers, organic items enhance user experience. To ensure long-term development, platforms aim to design mechanisms that optimize both revenue and user satisfaction. Current methods rank ads and organic items separately before integrating them. Even if each part is locally optimal, the combined result may not be globally optimal. In this paper, we come up with the Joint Integrated Regret Network (JINTER Net). Unlike traditional methods, which pre-order ads and organic items separately, JINTER Net directly selects from the combined set of candidate ads and organic items to generate an optimal list. This approach aims to optimally balance platform revenue and user experience while satisfying approximate dominant strategy incentive compatibility and individual rationality. We validate the effectiveness of JINTER Net using both synthetic data and real dataset, and our experimental results show that it significantly outperforms baseline models across multiple metrics.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Unified 2D-3D Discrete Priors for Noise-Robust and Calibration-Free Multiview 3D Human Pose Estimation

  • Geng Chen
  • Pengfei Ren
  • Xufeng Jian
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Menghao Zhang
  • Qi Qi
  • Zirui Zhuang
  • Jing Wang

Multi-view 3D human pose estimation (HPE) leverages complementary information across views to improve accuracy and robustness. Traditional methods rely on camera calibration to establish geometric correspondences, which is sensitive to calibration accuracy and lacks flexibility in dynamic settings. Calibration-free approaches address these limitations by learning adaptive view interactions, typically leveraging expressive and flexible continuous representations. However, as the multiview interaction relationship is learned entirely from data without constraint, they are vulnerable to noisy input, which can propagate, amplify and accumulate errors across all views, severely corrupting the final estimated pose. To mitigate this, we propose a novel framework that integrates a noise-resilient discrete prior into the continuous representation-based model. Specifically, we introduce the \textit{UniCodebook}, a unified, compact, robust, and discrete representation complementary to continuous features, allowing the model to benefit from robustness to noise while preserving regression capability. Furthermore, we further propose an attribute-preserving and complementarity-enhancing Discrete-Continuous Spatial Attention (DCSA) mechanism to facilitate interaction between discrete priors and continuous pose features. Extensive experiments on three representative datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms both calibration-required and calibration-free methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Competition among Pairwise Lottery Contests

  • Xiaotie Deng
  • Hangxin Gan
  • Ningyuan Li
  • Weian Li
  • Qi Qi

We investigate a two-stage competitive model involving multiple contests. In this model, each contest designer chooses two participants from a pool of candidate contestants and determines the biases. Contestants strategically distribute their efforts across various contests within their budget. We first show the existence of a pure strategy Nash equilibrium (PNE) for the contestants, and propose a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme to compute an approximate PNE. In the scenario where designers simultaneously decide the participants and biases, the subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE) may not exist. Nonetheless, when designers' decisions are made in two substages, the existence of SPE is established. In the scenario where designers can hold multiple contests, we show that the SPE always exists under mild conditions and can be computed efficiently.

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

FM-Delta: Lossless Compression for Storing Massive Fine-tuned Foundation Models

  • Wanyi Ning
  • Jingyu Wang
  • Qi Qi
  • Mengde Zhu
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Daixuan Cheng
  • Jianxin Liao
  • Ce Zhang

Pre-trained foundation models, particularly large language models, have achieved remarkable success and led to massive fine-tuned variants. These models are commonly fine-tuned locally and then uploaded by users to cloud platforms such as HuggingFace for secure storage. However, the huge model number and their billion-level parameters impose heavy storage overhead for cloud with limited resources. Our empirical and theoretical analysis reveals that most fine-tuned models in cloud have a small difference (delta) from their pre-trained models. To this end, we propose a novel lossless compression scheme FM-Delta specifically for storing massive fine-tuned models in cloud. FM-Delta maps fine-tuned and pre-trained model parameters into integers with the same bits, and entropy codes their integer delta. In this way, cloud only needs to store one uncompressed pre-trained model and other compressed fine-tuned models. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that FM-Delta efficiently reduces cloud storage consumption for massive fine-tuned models by an average of around 50% with only negligible additional time in most end-to-end cases. For example, on up to 10 fine-tuned models in the GPT-NeoX-20B family, FM-Delta reduces the original storage requirement from 423GB to 205GB, significantly saving cloud storage costs.

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Keypoint Fusion for RGB-D Based 3D Hand Pose Estimation

  • Xingyu Liu
  • Pengfei Ren
  • Yuanyuan Gao
  • Jingyu Wang
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Qi Qi
  • Zirui Zhuang
  • Jianxin Liao

Previous 3D hand pose estimation methods primarily rely on a single modality, either RGB or depth, and the comprehensive utilization of the dual modalities has not been extensively explored. RGB and depth data provide complementary information and thus can be fused to enhance the robustness of 3D hand pose estimation. However, there exist two problems for applying existing fusion methods in 3D hand pose estimation: redundancy of dense feature fusion and ambiguity of visual features. First, pixel-wise feature interactions introduce high computational costs and ineffective calculations of invalid pixels. Second, visual features suffer from ambiguity due to color and texture similarities, as well as depth holes and noise caused by frequent hand movements, which interferes with modeling cross-modal correlations. In this paper, we propose Keypoint-Fusion for RGB-D based 3D hand pose estimation, which leverages the unique advantages of dual modalities to mutually eliminate the feature ambiguity, and performs cross-modal feature fusion in a more efficient way. Specifically, we focus cross-modal fusion on sparse yet informative spatial regions (i.e. keypoints). Meanwhile, by explicitly extracting relatively more reliable information as disambiguation evidence, depth modality provides 3D geometric information for RGB feature pixels, and RGB modality complements the precise edge information lost due to the depth noise. Keypoint-Fusion achieves state-of-the-art performance on two challenging hand datasets, significantly decreasing the error compared with previous single-modal methods.

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Rethinking the Power of Timestamps for Robust Time Series Forecasting: A Global-Local Fusion Perspective

  • Chengsen Wang
  • Qi Qi
  • Jingyu Wang
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Zirui Zhuang
  • Jinming Wu
  • Jianxin Liao

Time series forecasting has played a pivotal role across various industries, including finance, transportation, energy, healthcare, and climate. Due to the abundant seasonal information they contain, timestamps possess the potential to offer robust global guidance for forecasting techniques. However, existing works primarily focus on local observations, with timestamps being treated merely as an optional supplement that remains underutilized. When data gathered from the real world is polluted, the absence of global information will damage the robust prediction capability of these algorithms. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework named GLAFF. Within this framework, the timestamps are modeled individually to capture the global dependencies. Working as a plugin, GLAFF adaptively adjusts the combined weights for global and local information, enabling seamless collaboration with any time series forecasting backbone. Extensive experiments conducted on nine real-world datasets demonstrate that GLAFF significantly enhances the average performance of widely used mainstream forecasting models by 12. 5\%, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art method by 5. 5\%.

IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Safeguarding Sustainable Cities: Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection through Diffusion-based Latent Pattern Learning

  • Menghao Zhang
  • Jingyu Wang
  • Qi Qi
  • Pengfei Ren
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Zirui Zhuang
  • Lei Zhang
  • Jianxin Liao

Sustainable cities requires high-quality community management and surveillance analytics, which are supported by video anomaly detection techniques. However, mainstream video anomaly detection techniques still require manually labeled data and do not apply to real-world massive videos. Without labeling, unsupervised video anomaly detection (UVAD) is challenged by the problem of pseudo-labeled noise and the openness of anomaly detection. In response, a diffusion-based latent pattern learning UVAD framework is proposed, called DiffVAD. The method learns potential patterns by generating different patterns of the same event through diffusion models. The detection of anomalies is realized by evaluating the pattern distribution. The different patterns of normal events are diverse but correlated, while the different patterns of abnormal events are more diffuse. This manner of detection is equally effective for unseen normal events in the training set. In addition, we design a refinement strategy for pseudo-labels to mitigate the effects of the noise problem. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate the design’s promising generalization ability and high efficiency. Specifically, DiffVAD obtains an AUC score of 81. 9% on the ShanghaiTech dataset.

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Single-Loop Stochastic Algorithms for Difference of Max-Structured Weakly Convex Functions

  • Quanqi Hu
  • Qi Qi
  • Zhaosong Lu
  • Tianbao Yang

In this paper, we study a class of non-smooth non-convex problems in the form of $\min_{x}[\max_{y\in\mathcal Y}\phi(x, y) - \max_{z\in\mathcal Z}\psi(x, z)]$, where both $\Phi(x) = \max_{y\in\mathcal Y}\phi(x, y)$ and $\Psi(x)=\max_{z\in\mathcal Z}\psi(x, z)$ are weakly convex functions, and $\phi(x, y), \psi(x, z)$ are strongly concave functions in terms of $y$ and $z$, respectively. It covers two families of problems that have been studied but are missing single-loop stochastic algorithms, i. e. , difference of weakly convex functions and weakly convex strongly-concave min-max problems. We propose a stochastic Moreau envelope approximate gradient method dubbed SMAG, the first single-loop algorithm for solving these problems, and provide a state-of-the-art non-asymptotic convergence rate. The key idea of the design is to compute an approximate gradient of the Moreau envelopes of $\Phi, \Psi$ using only one step of stochastic gradient update of the primal and dual variables. Empirically, we conduct experiments on positive-unlabeled (PU) learning and partial area under ROC curve (pAUC) optimization with an adversarial fairness regularizer to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.

YNICL Journal 2024 Journal Article

Temporal evolution of microstructural integrity in cerebellar peduncles in Parkinson’s disease: Stage-specific patterns and dopaminergic correlates

  • Chentao He
  • Rui Yang
  • Siming Rong
  • Piao Zhang
  • Xi Chen
  • Qi Qi
  • Ziqi Gao
  • Yan Li

BACKGROUND: Previous research revealed differences in cerebellar white matter integrity by disease stages, indicating a compensatory role in Parkinson's disease (PD). However, the temporal evolution of cerebellar white matter microstructure in patients with PD (PwPD) remains unclear. OBJECTIVE: To unravel temporal evolution of cerebellar white matter and its dopaminergic correlates in PD. METHODS: We recruited 124 PwPD from the PPMI study. The participants were divided into two subsets: Subset 1 (n = 41) had three MRI scans (baseline, 2 years, and 4 years), and Subset 2 (n = 106) had at least two MRI scans at baseline, 1 year, and/or 2 years. Free water-corrected diffusion metrics were used to measure the microstructural integrity in cerebellar peduncles (CP), the main white matter tracts connecting to and from the cerebellum. The ACAPULCO processing pipeline was used to assess cerebellar lobules volumes. Linear mixed-effect models were used to study longitudinal changes. We also examined the relationships between microstructural integrity in CP, striatal dopamine transporter specific binding ratio (SBR), and clinical symptoms. RESULTS: Microstructural changes in CP showed a non-linear pattern in PwPD. Free water-corrected fractional anisotropy (FAt) increased in the first two years but declined from 2 to 4 years, while free water-corrected mean diffusivity exhibited the opposite trend. The initial increased FAt in CP correlated with cerebellar regional volume atrophy, striatal dopaminergic SBR decline, and worsening clinical symptoms, but this correlation varied across disease stages. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest a non-linear evolution of microstructural integrity in CP throughout the course of PD, indicating the adaptive structural reorganization of the cerebellum simultaneously with progressive striatal dopaminergic degeneration in PD.

TMLR Journal 2023 Journal Article

Attentional-Biased Stochastic Gradient Descent

  • Qi Qi
  • Yi Xu
  • Wotao Yin
  • Rong Jin
  • Tianbao Yang

In this paper, we present a simple yet effective provable method (named ABSGD) for addressing the data imbalance or label noise problem in deep learning. Our method is a simple modification to momentum SGD where we assign an individual importance weight to each sample in the mini-batch. The individual-level weight of a sampled data is systematically proportional to the exponential of a scaled loss value of the data, where the scaling factor is interpreted as the regularization parameter in the framework of distributionally robust optimization (DRO). Depending on whether the scaling factor is positive or negative, ABSGD is guaranteed to converge to a stationary point of an information-regularized min-max or min-min DRO problem, respectively. Compared with existing class-level weighting schemes, our method can capture the diversity between individual examples within each class. Compared with existing individual-level weighting methods using meta-learning that require three backward propagations for computing mini-batch stochastic gradients, our method is more efficient with only one backward propagation at each iteration as in standard deep learning methods. ABSGD is flexible enough to combine with other robust losses without any additional cost. Our empirical studies on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Drift doesn't Matter: Dynamic Decomposition with Diffusion Reconstruction for Unstable Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

  • Chengsen Wang
  • Zirui Zhuang
  • Qi Qi
  • Jingyu Wang
  • Xingyu Wang
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Jianxin Liao

Many unsupervised methods have recently been proposed for multivariate time series anomaly detection. However, existing works mainly focus on stable data yet often omit the drift generated from non-stationary environments, which may lead to numerous false alarms. We propose **D**ynamic **D**ecomposition with **D**iffusion **R**econstruction (D$^3$R), a novel anomaly detection network for real-world unstable data to fill the gap. D$^3$R tackles the drift via decomposition and reconstruction. In the decomposition procedure, we utilize data-time mix-attention to dynamically decompose long-period multivariate time series, overcoming the limitation of the local sliding window. The information bottleneck is critical yet difficult to determine in the reconstruction procedure. To avoid retraining once the bottleneck changes, we control it externally by noise diffusion and directly reconstruct the polluted data. The whole model can be trained end-to-end. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that D$^3$R significantly outperforms existing methods, with a 11% average relative improvement over the previous SOTA models.

IJCAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Not Only Pairwise Relationships: Fine-Grained Relational Modeling for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

  • Jinming Wu
  • Qi Qi
  • Jingyu Wang
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Zhikang Wu
  • Zirui Zhuang
  • Jianxin Liao

Recent graph-based methods achieve significant success in multivariate time series modeling and forecasting due to their ability to handle relationships among time series variables. However, only pairwise relationships are considered in most existing works. They ignore beyond-pairwise relationships and their potential categories in practical scenarios, which leads to incomprehensive relationship learning for multivariate time series forecasting. In this paper, we present ReMo, a Relational Modeling-based method, to promote fine-grained relational learning among multivariate time series data. Firstly, by treating time series variables and complex relationships as nodes and hyperedges, we extract multi-view hypergraphs from data to capture beyond-pairwise relationships. Secondly, a novel hypergraph message passing strategy is designed to characterize both nodes and hyperedges by inferring the potential categories of relationships and further distinguishing their impacts on time series variables. By integrating these two modules into the time series forecasting framework, ReMo effectively improves the performance of multivariate time series forecasting. The experimental results on seven commonly used datasets from different domains demonstrate the superiority of our model.

TCS Journal 2023 Journal Article

Optimally integrating ad auction into e-commerce platforms

  • Weian Li
  • Qi Qi
  • Changjun Wang
  • Changyuan Yu

Advertising becomes one of the most popular ways of monetizing an online transaction platform. Usually, sponsored advertisements are posted on the most attractive positions to enhance the number of clicks. However, multiple e-commerce platforms are aware that this action may hurt the search experience of users, even though it can bring more incomes. To balance the advertising revenue and the user experience loss caused by advertisements, most e-commerce platforms choose fixing some areas for advertisements and adopting some restrictions on the number of ads, such as a fixed number K of ads or one advertisement for every N organic searched results. Different from these common rules of treating the allocation of ads separately (from the arrangements of the organic searched items), in this work we build up an integrated system with mixed arrangements of advertisements and organic items. We focus on the design of truthful mechanisms to properly list the advertisements and organic items and optimally trade off the instant revenue and the user experience. Furthermore, for different settings and practical requirements, we extend our optimal truthful allocation mechanisms to cater for these realistic conditions. Finally, we exert several experiments to verify the improvement of our mechanism compared to the common-used advertising mechanism.

AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Scene-Level Sketch-Based Image Retrieval with Minimal Pairwise Supervision

  • Ce Ge
  • Jingyu Wang
  • Qi Qi
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Tong Xu
  • Jianxin Liao

The sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) task has long been researched at the instance level, where both query sketches and candidate images are assumed to contain only one dominant object. This strong assumption constrains its application, especially with the increasingly popular intelligent terminals and human-computer interaction technology. In this work, a more general scene-level SBIR task is explored, where sketches and images can both contain multiple object instances. The new general task is extremely challenging due to several factors: (i) scene-level SBIR inherently shares sketch-specific difficulties with instance-level SBIR (e.g., sparsity, abstractness, and diversity), (ii) the cross-modal similarity is measured between two partially aligned domains (i.e., not all objects in images are drawn in scene sketches), and (iii) besides instance-level visual similarity, a more complex multi-dimensional scene-level feature matching problem is imposed (including appearance, semantics, layout, etc.). Addressing these challenges, a novel Conditional Graph Autoencoder model is proposed to deal with scene-level sketch-images retrieval. More importantly, the model can be trained with only pairwise supervision, which distinguishes our study from others in that elaborate instance-level annotations (for example, bounding boxes) are no longer required. Extensive experiments confirm the ability of our model to robustly retrieve multiple related objects at the scene level and exhibit superior performance beyond strong competitors.

AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Semi-transductive Learning for Generalized Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval

  • Ce Ge
  • Jingyu Wang
  • Qi Qi
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Tong Xu
  • Jianxin Liao

Sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) is an attractive research area where freehand sketches are used as queries to retrieve relevant images. Existing solutions have advanced the task to the challenging zero-shot setting (ZS-SBIR), where the trained models are tested on new classes without seen data. However, they are prone to overfitting under a realistic scenario when the test data includes both seen and unseen classes. In this paper, we study generalized ZS-SBIR (GZS-SBIR) and propose a novel semi-transductive learning paradigm. Transductive learning is performed on the image modality to explore the potential data distribution within unseen classes, and zero-shot learning is performed on the sketch modality sharing the learned knowledge through a semi-heterogeneous architecture. A hybrid metric learning strategy is proposed to establish semantics-aware ranking property and calibrate the joint embedding space. Extensive experiments are conducted on two large-scale benchmarks and four evaluation metrics. The results show that our method is superior over the state-of-the-art competitors in the challenging GZS-SBIR task.

TMLR Journal 2023 Journal Article

Stochastic Constrained DRO with a Complexity Independent of Sample Size

  • Qi Qi
  • Jiameng Lyu
  • Kung-Sik Chan
  • Er-Wei Bai
  • Tianbao Yang

Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO), as a popular method to train robust models against distribution shift between training and test sets, has received tremendous attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose and analyze stochastic algorithms that apply to both non-convex and convex losses for solving Kullback–Leibler divergence constrained DRO problem. Compared with existing methods solving this problem, our stochastic algorithms not only enjoy competitive if not better complexity independent of sample size but also just require a constant batch size at every iteration, which is more practical for broad applications. We establish a nearly optimal complexity bound for finding an $\epsilon$-stationary solution for non-convex losses and an optimal complexity for finding an $\epsilon$-optimal solution for convex losses. Empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms for solving non-convex and convex constrained DRO problems.

AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Two Heads Are Better than One: Image-Point Cloud Network for Depth-Based 3D Hand Pose Estimation

  • Pengfei Ren
  • Yuchen Chen
  • Jiachang Hao
  • Haifeng Sun
  • Qi Qi
  • Jingyu Wang
  • Jianxin Liao

Depth images and point clouds are the two most commonly used data representations for depth-based 3D hand pose estimation. Benefiting from the structuring of image data and the inherent inductive biases of the 2D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), image-based methods are highly efficient and effective. However, treating the depth data as a 2D image inevitably ignores the 3D nature of depth data. Point cloud-based methods can better mine the 3D geometric structure of depth data. However, these methods suffer from the disorder and non-structure of point cloud data, which is computationally inefficient. In this paper, we propose an Image-Point cloud Network (IPNet) for accurate and robust 3D hand pose estimation. IPNet utilizes 2D CNN to extract visual representations in 2D image space and performs iterative correction in 3D point cloud space to exploit the 3D geometry information of depth data. In particular, we propose a sparse anchor-based "aggregation-interaction-propagation'' paradigm to enhance point cloud features and refine the hand pose, which reduces irregular data access. Furthermore, we introduce a 3D hand model to the iterative correction process, which significantly improves the robustness of IPNet to occlusion and depth holes. Experiments show that IPNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three challenging hand datasets.

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

An Online Method for A Class of Distributionally Robust Optimization with Non-convex Objectives

  • Qi Qi
  • Zhishuai Guo
  • Yi Xu
  • Rong Jin
  • Tianbao Yang

In this paper, we propose a practical online method for solving a class of distributional robust optimization (DRO) with non-convex objectives, which has important applications in machine learning for improving the robustness of neural networks. In the literature, most methods for solving DRO are based on stochastic primal-dual methods. However, primal-dual methods for DRO suffer from several drawbacks: (1) manipulating a high-dimensional dual variable corresponding to the size of data is time expensive; (2) they are not friendly to online learning where data is coming sequentially. To address these issues, we consider a class of DRO with an KL divergence regularization on the dual variables, transform the min-max problem into a compositional minimization problem, and propose practical duality-free online stochastic methods without requiring a large mini-batch size. We establish the state-of-the-art complexities of the proposed methods with and without a Polyak-Łojasiewicz (PL) condition of the objective. Empirical studies on large-scale deep learning tasks (i) demonstrate that our method can speed up the training by more than 2 times than baseline methods and save days of training time on a large-scale dataset with ∼ 265K images, and (ii) verify the supreme performance of DRO over Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) on imbalanced datasets. Of independent interest, the proposed method can be also used for solving a family of stochastic compositional problems with state-of-the-art complexities.

JBHI Journal 2021 Journal Article

Curriculum Feature Alignment Domain Adaptation for Epithelium-Stroma Classification in Histopathological Images

  • Qi Qi
  • Xin Lin
  • Chaoqi Chen
  • Weiping Xie
  • Yue Huang
  • Xinghao Ding
  • Xiaoqing Liu
  • Yizhou Yu

In recent years, deep learning methods have received more attention in epithelial-stroma (ES) classification tasks. Traditional deep learning methods assume that the training and test data have the same distribution, an assumption that is seldom satisfied in complex imaging procedures. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) transfers knowledge from a labelled source domain to a completely unlabeled target domain, and is more suitable for ES classification tasks to avoid tedious annotation. However, existing UDA methods for this task ignore the semantic alignment across domains. In this paper, we propose a Curriculum Feature Alignment Network (CFAN) to gradually align discriminative features across domains through selecting effective samples from the target domain and minimizing intra-class differences. Specifically, we developed the Curriculum Transfer Strategy (CTS) and Adaptive Centroid Alignment (ACA) steps to train our model iteratively. We validated the method using three independent public ES datasets, and experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves better performance in ES classification compared with commonly used deep learning methods and existing deep domain adaptation methods.

AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Rain Streak Removal via Dual Graph Convolutional Network

  • Xueyang Fu
  • Qi Qi
  • Zheng-Jun Zha
  • Yurui Zhu
  • Xinghao Ding

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become dominant in the single image de-raining area. However, most deep CNNs-based de-raining methods are designed by stacking vanilla convolutional layers, which can only be used to model local relations. Therefore, long-range contextual information is rarely considered for this specific task. To address the above problem, we propose a simple yet effective dual graph convolutional network (GCN) for single image rain removal. Specifically, we design two graphs to perform global relational modeling and reasoning. The first GC- N is used to explore global spatial relations among pixels in feature maps, while the second GCN models the global relations across the channels. Compared to standard convolutional operations, the proposed two graphs enable the network to extract representations from new dimensions. To achieve the image rain removal, we further embed these two graphs and multi-scale dilated convolution into a symmetrically skip-connected network architecture. Therefore, our dual graph convolutional network is able to well handle complex and spatially long rain streaks by exploring multiple representations, e. g. , multi-scale local feature, global spatial coherence and cross-channel correlation. Meanwhile, our model is easy to implement, end-to-end trainable and computationally efficient. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements over the recent state-of-the-art methods.

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Stochastic Optimization of Areas Under Precision-Recall Curves with Provable Convergence

  • Qi Qi
  • Youzhi Luo
  • Zhao Xu
  • Shuiwang Ji
  • Tianbao Yang

Areas under ROC (AUROC) and precision-recall curves (AUPRC) are common metrics for evaluating classification performance for imbalanced problems. Compared with AUROC, AUPRC is a more appropriate metric for highly imbalanced datasets. While stochastic optimization of AUROC has been studied extensively, principled stochastic optimization of AUPRC has been rarely explored. In this work, we propose a principled technical method to optimize AUPRC for deep learning. Our approach is based on maximizing the averaged precision (AP), which is an unbiased point estimator of AUPRC. We cast the objective into a sum of dependent compositional functions with inner functions dependent on random variables of the outer level. We propose efficient adaptive and non-adaptive stochastic algorithms named SOAP with provable convergence guarantee under mild conditions by leveraging recent advances in stochastic compositional optimization. Extensive experimental results on image and graph datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms prior methods on imbalanced problems in terms of AUPRC. To the best of our knowledge, our work represents the first attempt to optimize AUPRC with provable convergence. The SOAP has been implemented in the libAUC library at https: //libauc. org/.

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

A Game-Theoretic Analysis of the Empirical Revenue Maximization Algorithm with Endogenous Sampling

  • Xiaotie Deng
  • Ron Lavi
  • Tao Lin
  • Qi Qi
  • Wenwei WANG
  • Xiang Yan

The Empirical Revenue Maximization (ERM) is one of the most important price learning algorithms in auction design: as the literature shows it can learn approximately optimal reserve prices for revenue-maximizing auctioneers in both repeated auctions and uniform-price auctions. However, in these applications the agents who provide inputs to ERM have incentives to manipulate the inputs to lower the outputted price. We generalize the definition of an incentive-awareness measure proposed by Lavi et al (2019), to quantify the reduction of ERM's outputted price due to a change of m>=1 out of N input samples, and provide specific convergence rates of this measure to zero as N goes to infinity for different types of input distributions. By adopting this measure, we construct an efficient, approximately incentive-compatible, and revenue-optimal learning algorithm using ERM in repeated auctions against non-myopic bidders, and show approximate group incentive-compatibility in uniform-price auctions.

AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

AWR: Adaptive Weighting Regression for 3D Hand Pose Estimation

  • Weiting Huang
  • Pengfei Ren
  • Jingyu Wang
  • Qi Qi
  • Haifeng Sun

In this paper, we propose an adaptive weighting regression (AWR) method to leverage the advantages of both detectionbased and regression-based method. Hand joint coordinates are estimated as discrete integration of all pixels in dense representation, guided by adaptive weight maps. This learnable aggregation process introduces both dense and joint supervision that allows end-to-end training and brings adaptability to weight maps, making network more accurate and robust. Comprehensive exploration experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness and generality of AWR under various experimental settings, especially its usefulness for different types of dense representation and input modality. Our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on four publicly available datasets, including NYU, ICVL, MSRA and HANDS 2017 dataset.

JBHI Journal 2019 Journal Article

Label-Efficient Breast Cancer Histopathological Image Classification

  • Qi Qi
  • Yanlong Li
  • Jitian Wang
  • Han Zheng
  • Yue Huang
  • Xinghao Ding
  • Gustavo Kunde Rohde

The automatic classification of breast cancer histopathological images has great significance in computer-aided diagnosis. Recently, deep learning via neural networks has enabled pattern detection and prediction using large, labeled datasets; whereas, collecting and annotating sufficient histological data using professional pathologists is time consuming, tedious, and extremely expensive. In the proposed paper, a deep active learning framework is designed and implemented for classification of breast cancer histopathological images, with the goal of maximizing the learning accuracy from very limited labeling. This method involves manual annotation of the most valuable unlabeled samples, which are then integrated into the training set. The model is then iteratively updated with an increasing training set. Here, two selection strategies are discussed for the proposed deep active learning framework: An entropy-based strategy and a confidence-boosting strategy. The proposed method has been validated using a publicly available breast cancer histopathological image dataset, wherein each image patch is binarily classified as benign or malignant. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared with a random selection, our proposed framework can reduce annotation costs up to 66. 67%, with higher accuracy and less expensive annotation than standard query strategy.

IJCAI Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Truthfulness of a Proportional Sharing Mechanism in Resource Exchange

  • Yukun Cheng
  • Xiaotie Deng
  • Qi Qi
  • Xiang Yan

In this paper, we consider the popular proportional sharing mechanism and discuss the incentives and opportunities of an agent to lie for personal gains in resource exchange game. The main result is a proof that an agent manipulating the proportional sharing mechanism by misreporting its resource amount will not benefit its own utility eventually. This result establishes a strategic stability property of the resource exchange protocol. We further illustrate and confirm the result via network examples.

TCS Journal 2008 Journal Article

Arbitrage opportunities across sponsored search markets

  • Tian-Ming Bu
  • Xiaotie Deng
  • Qi Qi

We model and study arbitrage across sponsored search markets, created by search engines. We identify and focus on traffic arbitrage and click arbitrage by auctioneers. We derive and characterize equilibria of such arbitrage behaviors across multiple markets.

TCS Journal 2008 Journal Article

Unconditional competitive auctions with copy and budget constraints

  • Tian-Ming Bu
  • Qi Qi
  • Aries Wei Sun

This paper investigates a new auction model in which bidders have both copy and budget constraints. This new model has extensive and interesting applications in auctions of online ad-words, software licenses, etc. We consider the following problem: Supposing all participators are rational, how does one allocate the objects and at what price so as to maximize the auctioneer’s revenue. We introduce new kinds of mechanisms called auctioneer-advantaged mechanisms and present the notion of unconditional competitive auctions. A notably interesting property of auctioneer-advantaged mechanisms is that each bidder’s self-interested strategy brings better utility not only to himself but also to the auctioneer. Then we present auctioneer-advantaged mechanisms for multi-unit auctions with copy and budget constraints. We prove that these auctions are unconditional competitive under the situation of both limited and unlimited supply.

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