Robust Data-Driven Auction Design

In the field of auction design, leveraging deep learning to solve optimal auctions from sampled data has become a promising direction. However, real-world contexts often involve uncertain data, which would severely affect the auction performance, but it is lacking consideration in existing works. To address this challenge, we incorporate these uncertainties into auction design metrics, and frame this challenge as a robust data-driven auction design problem. To solve this problem, we first propose the GAT method, where we introduce the process of problem relaxation and transformation to address the non-differentiable variable presented in the original problem, and further propose an adversarial training algorithm to solve the mini-max problem after transformation. Moreover, to obtain moderately robust auctions, we propose two methods to select the robust coefficient, which provides guidance and insights for selecting robust auctions based on generalization and performance metrics. Finally, with the insights from the GAT method, we further propose the SAT method, where we employ a strict and unified IC constraint that extends from the GAT method, which provides strong IC guarantees and stable revenue in uncertain environments. Experiments on both constructed and real-world datasets show that our robust methods effectively improve the performance of auctions in terms of revenue and IC guarantees.