Fast Iterative Combinatorial Auctions via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Luis F. Paul Tosta, Quinn Arnold, Gianluca Brero

Iterative combinatorial auctions are used in spectrum allocation, transportation, and industrial procurement, but rounds are costly. We introduce FastCombo, a deep reinforcement learning approach to sequential price discovery. Bayesian pricing has sharply reduced auction rounds even against subgradient benchmarks tuned with hindsight for each instance, but relies on a one-step objective and repeated online inference and optimization. We prove that greedily maximizing immediate clearing probability can require arbitrarily more rounds in expectation than an informative policy, even with the true valuation distribution known. FastCombo learns price policies offline, assigning credit to queries for the future decisions they enable and producing each online price update with a single neural-network forward pass. We formulate the objective of minimizing expected rounds to clearing in single-minded auctions as a partially observable Markov decision process and train a recurrent bidder-item graph policy over complete auction trajectories. In a one-item experiment, all five trained policies learn an informative opening, reducing expected rounds from 1.85 to 1.65 relative to the tested…