Papers › Optimal-er Auctions through Attention

Optimal-er Auctions through Attention

26 Feb 2022arXiv:2202.13110archive 2025-07-28

Dmitry Ivanov, Iskander Safiulin, Igor Filippov, Ksenia Balabaeva

RegretNet is a recent breakthrough in the automated design of revenue-maximizing auctions. It combines the flexibility of deep learning with the regret-based approach to relax the Incentive Compatibility (IC) constraint (that participants prefer to bid truthfully) in order to approximate optimal auctions. We propose two independent improvements of RegretNet. The first is a neural architecture denoted as RegretFormer that is based on attention layers. The second is a loss function that requires explicit specification of an acceptable IC violation denoted as regret budget. We investigate both modifications in an extensive experimental study that includes settings with constant and inconstant number of items and participants, as well as novel validation procedures tailored to regret-based approaches. We find that RegretFormer consistently outperforms RegretNet in revenue (i.e. is optimal-er) and that our loss function both simplifies hyperparameter tuning and allows to unambiguously control the revenue-regret trade-off by selecting the regret budget.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

8 samples harvested; 7 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 1 has no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 0 of the 8 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from dimonenka/optimaler. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections