About me

Hello, I am Zhijian Duan (段志健). I received my Ph.D. in 2025 from CFCS at Peking University, where I was supervised by Professor Xiaotie Deng in daGAME lab. Prior to this, I received my Bachelor’s degree in 2020 from Turing Class in the School of EECS at Peking University. During my undergraduate studies, I had the privilege of working with Professor Ming Zhang and Professor Hao Dong at Peking University, as well as Professor Jian Tang at Mila.

Research Interests

My research focuses on the intersection of algorithmic game theory and machine learning, with a particular emphasis on the following topics:

• Machine learning-based mechanism design.
• Equilibrium computation leveraging machine learning techniques.
• Online advertising, including ad auction design and auto-bidding.

For more information, please refer to my publication list.

Selected Publications

• Zhijian Duan*, Haoran Sun*, Yichong Xia, Siqiang Wang, Zhilin Zhang, Chuan Yu, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng, Xiaotie Deng. Automated Deterministic Auction Design with Objective Decomposition. In WWW 2026. [arXiv]
• Zhijian Duan, Yusen Huo, Tianyu Wang, Zhilin Zhang, Yeshu Li, Chuan Yu, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng, Xiaotie Deng. An Adaptable Budget Planner for Enhancing Budget-Constrained Auto-Bidding in Online Advertising. In KDD 2025.
• Zhijian Duan, Haoran Sun, Yurong Chen, Xiaotie Deng. A Scalable Neural Network for DSIC Affine Maximizer Auction Design. In NeurIPS 2023, spotlight (top 5\%). [arXiv][Code]
• Zhijian Duan, Yunxuan Ma, Xiaotie Deng. Are Equivariant Equilibrium Approximators Beneficial? In ICML 2023. [arXiv]
  
• Zhijian Duan, Wenhan Huang, Dinghuai Zhang, Yali Du, Jun Wang, Yaodong Yang, Xiaotie Deng. Is Nash Equilibrium Approximator Learnable? In AAMAS 2023. [arXiv]
• Zhijian Duan, Jingwu Tang, Yutong Yin, Zhe Feng, Xiang Yan, Manzil Zaheer, Xiaotie Deng. A Context-Integrated Transformer-Based Neural Network for Auction Design. In ICML 2022. [arXiv][code]

( * denotes equal contribution)

Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Software and Theory, CFCS, Peking University, 2020-2025. Advisor: Xiaotie Deng.
• B.S. in Computer Science, Turing Class, Peking University, 2016-2020, GPA 3.72/4.0 (Top 15%).

Academic Service

• Invited Reviewer (Conference): NeurIPS’23’24’25’26, ICML’25’26, ICLR’24’25’26, KDD’25’26, WWW’22’26, AAMAS’23’25.
• Invited Reviewer (Journal): TCS, ACML.

Teaching

• TA of ALgorithmic Game Theory by Prof. Xiaotie Deng, Fall 2023.
• TA of Mathematics in AI by Prof. Xiaotie Deng, Spring 2022.
• TA of Discrete Math (II) and Interactions by Prof. Xiaotie Deng, Spring 2021.
• TA of Deep Generative Models by Prof. Hao Dong, Spring 2020.
• TA of Algorithm Design and Analysis (Honor Track) by Prof. Ming Zhang, Spring 2019.

Miscellaneous

• I like playing badminton. In 2016, I was part of the winning team in the freshman badminton competition at Peking University.