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Learning Truthful Mechanisms without Discretization

  • Yunxuan Ma
  • , Steven (Siqiang) Wang
  • , Zhijian Duan
  • , Yukun Cheng*
  • , Xiaotie Deng*
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary WorksRGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)peer-review

Abstract

This paper introduces TEDI (Truthful, Expressive, and Dimension-Insensitive approach), the first discretization-free algorithm to learn truthful mechanisms. Existing learning-based algorithms rely on discretization of outcome spaces to ensure truthfulness, which suffers from inefficiency as problem size increases. To address this limitation, we formalize the concept of pricing rules, defined as functions that map outcomes to prices. We then parameterize pricing rules using Partial GroupMax Network, a novel network architecture designed to universally approximate partial convex functions. To enable optimization, we develop two training techniques: covariance trick and continuous sampling, to derive unbiased gradient estimators compatible with first-order optimization. Together, these design choices ensure the truthfulness, expressiveness and dimension-insensitivity of TEDI, and our experiments show that it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in medium-to-large scale problems. © 2026 International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAAMAS 2026 - Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages662-670
ISBN (Print)9798400723179
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2026
Externally publishedYes
Event25th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2026) - Paphos, Cyprus
Duration: 25 May 202629 May 2026

Publication series

NameAAMAS - Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

Conference

Conference25th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2026)
PlaceCyprus
CityPaphos
Period25/05/2629/05/26

Funding

Yukun Cheng and Xiaotie Deng are the corresponding authors. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 12471339, 62572010). Yunxuan Ma would like to thank Ruosong Wang, Lei Wu and Haoran Sun from Peking University for helpful discussions.

Research Keywords

  • Automated Mechanism Design
  • Deep Learning
  • Differentiable Economics
  • First-Order Algorithm

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