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David C. Parkes

19 accepted papers

2025

BundleFlow: Deep Menus for Combinatorial Auctions by Diffusion-Based Optimization

NeurIPS 2025poster

Differentiable economics—the use of deep learning for auction design—has driven progress in multi-item auction design with additive and unit-demand valuations. However, there has been little progress for combinatorial auctions (CAs), even in the simplest and yet important single bidder case, due to…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Inner Speech as Behavior Guides: Steerable Imitation of Diverse Behaviors for Human-AI coordination

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Effective human-AI coordination requires artificial agents capable of exhibiting and responding to human-like behaviors while adapting to changing contexts. Imitation learning has emerged as one of the prominent approaches to build such agents by training them to mimic human-demonstrated behaviors.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Decongestion by Representation: Learning to Improve Economic Welfare in Marketplaces

ICLR 2024poster

Congestion is a common failure mode of markets, where consumers compete inefficiently on the same subset of goods (e.g., chasing the same small set of properties on a vacation rental platform). The typical economic story is that prices decongest by balancing supply and demand. But in modern online…

2024

Generative Adversarial Equilibrium Solvers

ICLR 2024poster

We introduce the use of generative adversarial learning to compute equilibria in general game-theoretic settings, specifically the generalized Nash equilibrium (GNE) in pseudo-games, and its specific instantiation as the competitive equilibrium (CE) in Arrow-Debreu competitive economies. Pseudo-game…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

Multi-Sender Persuasion: A Computational Perspective

ICML 2024poster

We consider *multiple senders* with informational advantage signaling to convince a single self-interested actor to take certain actions. Generalizing the seminal *Bayesian Persuasion* framework, such settings are ubiquitous in computational economics, multi-agent learning, and machine learning with…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2024

Position: Social Environment Design Should be Further Developed for AI-based Policy-Making

ICML 2024poster

Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds promise as a technology that can be used to improve government and economic policy-making. This paper proposes a new research agenda towards this end by introducing **Social Environment Design**, a general framework for the use of AI in automated policy-making that…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2023

Deep Contract Design via Discontinuous Networks

NeurIPS 2023poster

Contract design involves a principal who establishes contractual agreements about payments for outcomes that arise from the actions of an agent. In this paper, we initiate the study of deep learning for the automated design of optimal contracts. We introduce a novel representation: the Discontinuous…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2023

Oracles & Followers: Stackelberg Equilibria in Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2023poster

Stackelberg equilibria arise naturally in a range of popular learning problems, such as in security games or indirect mechanism design, and have received increasing attention in the reinforcement learning literature. We present a general framework for implementing Stackelberg equilibria search as a…

Cited by 25SourcePDFScholar
2022

CrowdPlay: Crowdsourcing Human Demonstrations for Offline Learning

ICLR 2022poster

Crowdsourcing has been instrumental for driving AI advances that rely on large-scale data. At the same time, reinforcement learning has seen rapid progress through benchmark environments that strike a balance between tractability and real-world complexity, such as ALE and OpenAI Gym. In this paper,…

2022

Explainable Reinforcement Learning via Model Transforms

NeurIPS 2022accept

Understanding emerging behaviors of reinforcement learning (RL) agents may be difficult since such agents are often trained in complex environments using highly complex decision making procedures. This has given rise to a variety of approaches to explainability in RL that aim to reconcile discrepanc…

2022

Learning to Mitigate AI Collusion on Economic Platforms

NeurIPS 2022accept

Algorithmic pricing on online e-commerce platforms raises the concern of tacit collusion, where reinforcement learning algorithms learn to set collusive prices in a decentralized manner and through nothing more than profit feedback. This raises the question as to whether collusive pricing can be pre…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2020

From Predictions to Decisions: Using Lookahead Regularization

NeurIPS 2020poster

Machine learning is a powerful tool for predicting human-related outcomes, from creditworthiness to heart attack risks. But when deployed transparently, learned models also affect how users act in order to improve outcomes. The standard approach to learning predictive models is agnostic to induced…

2019

Finding Friend and Foe in Multi-Agent Games

NeurIPS 2019spotlight

Recent breakthroughs in AI for multi-agent games like Go, Poker, and Dota, have seen great strides in recent years. Yet none of these games address the real-life challenge of cooperation in the presence of unknown and uncertain teammates. This challenge is a key game mechanism in hidden role games.…

2017

Multi-View Decision Processes: The Helper-AI Problem

NeurIPS 2017poster

We consider a two-player sequential game in which agents have the same reward function but may disagree on the transition probabilities of an underlying Markovian model of the world. By committing to play a specific policy, the agent with the correct model can steer the behavior of the other agent,…

Cited by 32SourcePDFScholar