Dong HAO  (郝 東)

ABOUT ME

I'm an associate professor in the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC). I obtained my Ph.D. in Informatics in Kyushu University, Japan under the supervision of Professor Makoto Yokoo. My research interests lies in the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Economics, especially about (1) understanding how people or intelligent agents think and behave when they interact with others, and (2) how they learn about others' behavior and how their behavior adapts when they are in dynamic, uncertain or networked environments. The research tasks are mainly about the modeling, reasoning, optimization and algorithm design for these issues. 

Curriculum Vitae 

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Game Theory;  Mechanism Design; Market Design;  Incentives;  Social and Economic Networks;  Learning and Decision Making

TEACHING

I has been given “The Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award” in UESTC.  I teach the following classes:

Discrete Mathematics: for undergraduates. (64 class hours, 2014-2025)

Algorithmic Game Theory: for master/doctoral students. (20 class hours, 2016-2025) 

Applied Machine Learning for Beginners：for undergraduates in Yingcai Honors College. (16 class hours, 2020-2025) 

ACADEMIC SERVICES

Reviewer for Journals: 

Artificial Intelligence Journal; Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research; Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems; ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation; Games; IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Systems; IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology; IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking;  IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, European Journal of Operational Research, etc.

PC/Senior PC Members: 

AAAI'2019, AAAI'2020, AAAI'2021, AAAI'2022, AAAI'2023(SPC), AAAI'2024(SPC), AAAI'2025(SPC), AAAI'2026(SPC)

IJCAI'2021(SPC), IJCAI'2022(SPC), IJCAI'2023, IJCAI'2024, IJCAI'2025

ECAI'2022, ECAI'2023(SPC)

AAMAS'2021, AAMAS'2022, AAMAS'2023, AAMAS'2024, AAMAS'2025

WINE'2024

Hosting workshops at IJCAI:

We have organized workshops on "Mechanism Design on Social Networks (MNET)" in IJCAI for two years. 

1. Mechanism Design in Social Networks,First International Workshop, MNet 2024, Held in Conjunction with IJCAI 2024, Jeju, South Korea, August 4, 2024, [Proceedings Link]

2. Mechanism Design in Social Networks 2nd International Workshop, MNet 2025, Held in Conjunction with IJCAI 2025, Montreal, Canada, August 16–22, 2025, [Proceedings Link]

CURRENT RESEARCH TOPICS

Auction in Complex and Network Settings: Auction is the common paradigm for resource allocation which is a fundamental problem in human society. Classic auction research indicates that the two primary objectives, the seller's revenue and the allocation efficiency, are generally conflicting in auction design. Our research expand the domain of the classic auction to a social graph and formally identify a new class of auction mechanisms on graphs. All mechanisms in this class are incentive-compatible and also promote all buyers to diffuse the auction information to others, whereby both the seller's revenue and the allocation efficiency are significantly improved comparing with the state-of-the-art mechanisms.

Cooperation in Game Theory/Multi-agent Systems: Maintaining mutual cooperation among multiple individuals is important for both human society and artificial intelligence and economic system. This is because in many real-world scenarios, there exists tension between different agents’ interests. Although mutual cooperation leads to higher social welfare, agents usually have incentives to free ride, which finally results in a loss-loss situation. We develop a new theory for maintaining mutual cooperation in multiplayer games. We find that in repeated multiplayer games, it is even possible for a single normal player to delicately design a control strategy. With such a nice property, a control strategy player can sustain mutual cooperation among all players.

Explainable Machine Learning and Application in Finance: My research also focuses on explainable machine learning with a particular emphasis on its applications in finance and networked systems. I am especially interested in how models and results from theoretical computer science, cooperative game theory, and formal languages can be combined with modern machine learning to produce models that are both highly predictive and transparent in their decision-making. My work aims to build explainable ML systems that not only perform well statistically, but also offer clear, economically interpretable insights that are essential for high-stakes financial decision-making.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• (BOOK) Chinese translation of Tim Roughgarden's book “Twenty Lectures on Algorithmic Game Theory”. HZ BOOKS. 2020. With Fan Liu and Bin Li. [Book link]

• Strategyproofness and Monotone Allocation of Auction in Social Networks. Yuhang Guo, Dong Hao, Bin Li, Mingyu Xiao, Bakh Khoussainov. IJCAI 2025. [Paper link]

• Explainable Graph Neural Networks via Structural Externalities. L Wu, D Hao, Z Fan. IJCAI 2025. [Paper link]

• Alleviating Subgraph-Induced Oversmoothing in Link Prediction via Coarse Graining. Xudong Zhu, Dong Hao, Liming Pan, Ziqin Gao. Neurocomputing. 2025.  [Paper link]

• Handwritten Signature Verification via Multimodal Consistency Learning. Z Shi, F Li, D Hao, Q Sun. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. 2025. [Paper link]

• DropEdge not Foolproof: Effective Augmentation Method for Signed Graph Neural Networks. Z Zhang, L Li, S Wan, S Wang, Z Wang, Z Lu, D Hao, W Li. NeurIPS 2025. [Paper link]

• Core-Competitiveness in Partially Observable Networked Market. With Bin Li. The Web Conference (WWW-2024). [Paper link]

• Diffusion Auction Design with Transaction Costs. With Bin Li and Dengji Zhao: Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 38.1 (2024): 2. [Paper link]

• Networked Combinatorial Auction for Crowdsourcing and Crowdsensing. With Yuhang Guo, Mingyu Xiao and Bin Li: IEEE Internet of Things Journal. 2023. Corresponding author. [Paper link]

• Social Sourcing: Incorporating Social Networks Into Crowdsourcing Contest Design. With Qi Shi. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. ISSN: 1063-6692. Corresponding author. [Paper link]

• Cooperation, Retaliation and Forgiveness in Revision Games. With Qi Shi, Jinyan Su and Bo An. arXiv:2112.02271. Corresponding author. [Paper link]

• Diffusion Auction Design. Artificial Intelligence, 103631. 2021. With Bin Li, Dengji Zhao and Hui Gao. Corresponding author. [Paper link]

• Incentive Scoring Mechanism Design in Battle Royale Games. 5th International Conference on Algorithms, Computing and Systems. with Qi Shi and Shuai Mao. [Paper link]

• Emerging Methods of Auction Design in Social Networks. In the Proceedings of the 30th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2021). with Yuhang Guo. Corresponding author. [Paper link]

• Incentive Mechanism Design for ROI-constrained Auto-bidding. arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.02652. with Bin Li, Xiao Yang, Daren Sun, Zhi Ji, Zhen Jiang and Cong Han. [Paper link]

• Incentive-Compatible Diffusion Auctions. Proceeding of the 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2020). with Bin Li and Dengji Zhao. Corresponding author. [Paper link]

• Diffusion and Auction on Graphs. In the Proceedings of the 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2019). with Bin Li, Dengji Zhao and Makoto Yokoo. Corresponding author. [Paper link]

• Cooperation Enforcement and Collusion Resistance in Repeated Public Goods Games. In the Proceedings of the 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2019) . with Kai Li. Corresponding author. [Paper link]

• Customer Sharing in Economic Networks with Costs. In the Proceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2018). with Bin Li, Dengji Zhao and Tao Zhou. Corresponding author. [Paper link]

• Payoff Control in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the Proceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2018). with Kai Li and Tao Zhou.  Corresponding author. [Paper link]

• Selling Multiple Items via Social Networks. In the Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. (AAMAS-2018).  with Dengji Zhao, Bin Li, Junping Xu and Nick Jennings. [Paper link] 

• Link prediction via Linear Optimization. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications. 2018. with Pech Ratha, Yan-Li Lee, Ye Yuan, and Tao Zhou. [Paper link]

• Enhancing Subspace Clustering Based on Dynamic Prediction. Frontiers of Computer Science. 2018. with Pech Ratha, Hong Cheng and Tao Zhou. [Paper link]

• Mechanism Design in Social Networks. In the Proceedings of the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2017). with Bin Li, Dengji Zhao and Tao Zhou. Corresponding author. [Paper link]

• Local Similarity and Community Paradigm: The Robust Methods toward Link Prediction. In the Proceedings of the IEEE 2nd International Conference on Big Data Analysis. 2017. with Pech Ratha.  [Paper link]

• Link Prediction via Matrix Completion. EPL (Europhysics Letters). 2017. with Pech Ratha, Liming Pan, Hong Cheng and Tao Zhou. Corresponding author. [Paper link]

• Predicting Drug-Target Interactions via Sparse Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.01876. 2017. with Pech Ratha, Maryna Po and Tao Zhou. [Paper link]

• Extortion under Uncertainty: Zero-Determinant Strategies in Noisy Repeated Games. with Z. Rong and T. Zhou:  Physical Review E. 2015. Corresponding author. [Paper link]

• Zero-Determinant Strategies in Iterated Public Goods Games. Scientific Reports. 2015. with Liming Pan, Zhihai Rong and Tao Zhou. [Paper link]

• Zero-Determinant Strategy: An Underway Revolution in Game Theory. Chinese Physics B. 2014. with Zhihai Rong and Tao Zhou. [Paper link]

• (DOMESTIC CONFERENCE) Single Agent Optimal Pricing under Market Uncertainty by Using POMDP. International Joint Agent Workshop and Symposium. 2012.  with Atsushi Iwasaki, Makoto Yokoo, YongJoon Joe, Michihiro Kandori and Ichiro Obara. [Paper link]

• A Repeated Game Approach for Analyzing the Collusion on Selective Forwarding in Multihop Wireless networks. Computer Communications. 2012. with Xiaojuan Liao, Avishek Adhikari and Makoto Yokoo. [Paper link]

• A Differential Game Theoretic Model for Real-Time Spectrum Pricing in Cognitive Radio Networks. IEEE 37th Conference on Local Computer Networks, 2012. with Atsushi Iwasaki and Makoto Yokoo. [Paper link]

• A Differential Game Approach to Mitigating Primary User Emulation Attacks in Cognitive Radio Networks. In 2012 IEEE 26th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications. 2012. [Paper link]

• Mixed-Strategy Game Based Trust Management for Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks. In International Conference on Trusted Systems. 2011. with A. Adhikari and K. Sakurai. [Paper link]