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Zhide Wei

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3 papers
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3

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Cost Minimization for Equilibrium Transition

  • Haoqiang Huang
  • Zihe Wang
  • Zhide Wei
  • Jie Zhang

In this paper, we delve into the problem of using monetary incentives to encourage players to shift from an initial Nash equilibrium to a more favorable one within a game. Our main focus revolves around computing the minimum reward required to facilitate this equilibrium transition. The game involves a single row player who possesses m strategies and k column players, each endowed with n strategies. Our findings reveal that determining whether the minimum reward is zero is NP-complete, and computing the minimum reward becomes APX-hard. Nonetheless, we bring some positive news, as this problem can be efficiently handled if either k or n is a fixed constant. Furthermore, we have devised an approximation algorithm with an additive error that runs in polynomial time. Lastly, we explore a specific case wherein the utility functions exhibit single-peaked characteristics, and we successfully demonstrate that the optimal reward can be computed in polynomial time.

ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

On The Relative Error of Random Fourier Features for Preserving Kernel Distance

  • Kuan Cheng
  • Shaofeng H. -C. Jiang
  • Luojian Wei
  • Zhide Wei

The method of random Fourier features (RFF), proposed in a seminal paper by Rahimi and Recht (NIPS'07), is a powerful technique to find approximate low-dimensional representations of points in (high-dimensional) kernel space, for shift-invariant kernels. While RFF has been analyzed under various notions of error guarantee, the ability to preserve the kernel distance with \emph{relative} error is less understood. We show that for a significant range of kernels, including the well-known Laplacian kernels, RFF cannot approximate the kernel distance with small relative error using low dimensions. We complement this by showing as long as the shift-invariant kernel is analytic, RFF with $\mathrm{poly}(\epsilon^{-1} \log n)$ dimensions achieves $\epsilon$-relative error for pairwise kernel distance of $n$ points, and the dimension bound is improved to $\mathrm{poly}(\epsilon^{-1}\log k)$ for the specific application of kernel $k$-means. Finally, going beyond RFF, we make the first step towards data-oblivious dimension-reduction for general shift-invariant kernels, and we obtain a similar $\mathrm{poly}(\epsilon^{-1} \log n)$ dimension bound for Laplacian kernels. We also validate the dimension-error tradeoff of our methods on simulated datasets, and they demonstrate superior performance compared with other popular methods including random-projection and Nystr\"{o}m methods.

AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Bounded Incentives in Manipulating the Probabilistic Serial Rule

  • Zihe Wang
  • Zhide Wei
  • Jie Zhang

The Probabilistic Serial mechanism is well-known for its desirable fairness and efficiency properties. It is one of the most prominent protocols for the random assignment problem. However, Probabilistic Serial is not incentive-compatible, thereby these desirable properties only hold for the agents’ declared preferences, rather than their genuine preferences. A substantial utility gain through strategic behaviors would trigger self-interested agents to manipulate the mechanism and would subvert the very foundation of adopting the mechanism in practice. In this paper, we characterize the extent to which an individual agent can increase its utility by strategic manipulation. We show that the incentive ratio of the mechanism is 3 2. That is, no agent can misreport its preferences such that its utility becomes more than 1. 5 times of what it is when reports truthfully. This ratio is a worst-case guarantee by allowing an agent to have complete information about other agents’ reports and to figure out the best response strategy even if it is computationally intractable in general. To complement this worst-case study, we further evaluate an agent’s utility gain on average by experiments. The experiments show that an agent’ incentive in manipulating the rule is very limited. These results shed some light on the robustness of Probabilistic Serial against strategic manipulation, which is one step further than knowing that it is not incentive-compatible.