About me

Hello, I am Zhijian Duan (段志健), a Ph.D. student in CFCS at Peking University, where I am supervised by Professor Xiaotie Deng in daGAME lab. Prior to this, I received my Bachelor’s degree 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.

Publications and Preprints

• Scalable Virtual Valuations Combinatorial Auction Design by Combining Zeroth-Order and First-Order Optimization Method. [ArXiv]
  Zhijian Duan*, Haoran Sun*, Yichong Xia, Siqiang Wang, Zhilin Zhang, Chuan Yu, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng, Xiaotie Deng.
  In preprint, 2024.

• A Survey on Algorithms for Nash Equilibria in Finite Normal-Form Games. [Article][ArXiv]
  Hanyu Li, Wenhan Huang, Zhijian Duan, David Henry Mguni, Kun Shao, Jun Wang, Xiaotie Deng.
  In Computer Science Review, 2024.

• A Scalable Neural Network for DSIC Affine Maximizer Auction Design. [OpenReview][ArXiv][Code]
  Zhijian Duan, Haoran Sun, Yurong Chen, Xiaotie Deng.
  In NeurIPS 2023, spotlight (~4\%).

• Are Equivariant Equilibrium Approximators Beneficial? [Proceedings][ArXiv]
  Zhijian Duan, Yunxuan Ma, Xiaotie Deng.
  In ICML 2023.

• Coordinated Dynamic Bidding in Repeated Second-Price Auctions with Budgets. [Proceedings][ArXiv]
  Yurong Chen*, Qian Wang*, Zhijian Duan, Haoran Sun, Zhaohua Chen, Xiang Yan, Xiaotie Deng.
  In ICML 2023.

• Learning-Based Ad Auction Design with Externalities: the Framework and A Matching-Based Approach. [Proceedings]
  Ningyuan Li, Yunxuan Ma, Yang Zhao, Zhijian Duan, Yurong Chen, Zhilin Zhang, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng, Xiaotie Deng.
  In KDD 2023.

• Is Nash Equilibrium Approximator Learnable? [Proceedings][ArXiv]
  Zhijian Duan, Wenhan Huang, Dinghuai Zhang, Yali Du, Jun Wang, Yaodong Yang, Xiaotie Deng.
  In AAMAS 2023.

• A Context-Integrated Transformer-Based Neural Network for Auction Design. [Proceedings][ArXiv][Code]
  Zhijian Duan, Jingwu Tang, Yutong Yin, Zhe Feng, Xiang Yan, Manzil Zaheer, Xiaotie Deng.
  In ICML 2022.

• Efficient Dual-Process Cognitive Recommender Balancing Accuracy and Diversity. [Proceedings]
  Yixu Gao, Kun Shao, Zhijian Duan, Zhongyu Wei, Dong Li, Bin Wang, Mengchen Zhao, Jianye Hao.
  In DASFAA 2022.

• Role-Wise Data Augmentation for Knowledge Distillation. [ArXiv][Code]
  Jie Fu*, Xue Geng*, Zhijian Duan, Bohan Zhuang, Xingdi Yuan, Adam Trischler, Jie Lin, Chris Pal, Hao Dong.
  In preprint, 2020.

• Ekar: An Explainable Method for Knowledge Aware Recommendation. [ArXiv]
  Weiping Song*, Zhijian Duan*, Ziqing Yang, Hao Zhu, Ming Zhang, Jian Tang.
  In preprint, 2019.

• Autoint: Automatic feature interaction learning via self-attentive neural networks. [Proceedings][ArXiv][Code]
  Weiping Song, Chence Shi, Zhiping Xiao, Zhijian Duan, Yewen Xu, Ming Zhang, Jian Tang.
  In CIKM 2019.

( * denotes equal contribution)

Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Software and Theory, CFCS, Peking University, 2020-2025 (expected). 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): WWW’22, AAMAS’23, NeurIPS’23, ICLR’24.
• Invited Reviewer (Journal): TCS.

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.