We notice that two participants @lizhipeng and @li_zhi_peng may be registering multiple accounts and participating in the challenge as two separate teams. Specifically,
@lizhipeng participates as team “note1” (ranking 4th in Track 3).
@li_zhi_peng participates as team “ihun” (ranking 2nd in Track 3).
Not only do these two participants share similar usernames, their solutions also share a lot in common. The following are some examples of their very similar code snippets.
@li_zhi_peng writes the following code as is_mc().
Therefore, as the organizer of Amazon KDD Cup 2024, I require @lizhipeng and @li_zhi_peng to give formal explanations to these similarities. **If no proper reply is received before July 15th 23:59 UTC, both teams will be disqualified, as per the rules. **
Dear Yilun, Competition Committee, and all participants:
I am Yingyi Zhang, the team leader of the ihun team. First and foremost, on behalf of my team, I extend our deepest apologies to the committee and all participating teams for the problem of “two teams”. This was our first time participating in such an international competition, and we lacked a sufficient understanding of the rules, especially regarding the specific regulations for merging teams. The rules did not clearly specify the time point at which teams could merge in the whole stage, leading to a misunderstanding on our part. We have done our best to rectify this mistake before this discussion.
I want to clarify that our intention has always been to submit an excellent solution through teamwork, and we had no intention of participating as separate teams deliberately. In fact, all four of us participated together in the first stage, but our performance was poor. The committee did not announce the cut-off line for the second stage, and we were not confident about advancing to the second stage. However, when we were fortunate enough to advance, we found that we could not merge our teams, leading to this mistake, for which we are deeply sorry.
Regarding the code duplication issue, we notified the committee via email at the end of the competition to merge our teams promptly. Last Friday, before receiving this discussion, we proactively contacted Yilun Jin via email to request the team merge or the disqualification of the Note1 team. Unfortunately, we have not received any response yet. It should be noted that the results submitted by the Note1 team in the final re-evaluation stage were actually the top-2 worst submissions among our submissions, and we had no intention of affecting the rankings of other teams of our problem. The low scores would not harm the interests of any participants.
Our team did not gain any additional submission opportunities or rewards due to this mistake. On the contrary, we submitted our lowest performance results to avoid any undue advantage. Our mistake lay in failing to complete the team merge in a timely manner, which is evident from our submission results. If the committee would grant us the opportunity to present our rank 2 solution at the venue, we would be extremely grateful.
Finally, we want to express our deep gratitude to the organizers for providing such a valuable platform, allowing us the opportunity to tackle real-world problems. We also appreciate our own hard work and relentless pursuit over the past two months.
Once again, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused to the committee and all participating teams. We hope for your understanding and support, and we are willing to accept any decision the committee deems appropriate.
We receive your explanation. By accident, the email sent by lzp1120870321@gmail.com went into spam, and thus I failed to check that.
Given that you sent us the mail immediately after the submission deadline, the team ‘ihun’ would not be affected, and will be evaluated and ranked normally. We also would not count the team ‘note1’.
Sorry for the anxiety caused, and thank you for your insightful 2nd-place solution. Looking forward to seeing you in Barcelona.
Dear Yilun and Amazon KDD Cup 2024 Organizers,
Hello!
Thank you for your prompt response and understanding regarding our situation. We appreciate your efforts in addressing the issue and are grateful for the decision to evaluate and rank our team ‘ihun’ normally.
We apologize for any unexpected trouble our emails may have caused and appreciate your clarification that our email went to spam by some coincidence. Your understanding has alleviated our concerns, and we are relieved to know that our submission will be considered fairly.
We are excited to present our 2nd-place solution and look forward to participating in the workshop in Barcelona. Thank you once again for your support and for providing this valuable platform for us to challenge ourselves.
Best regards,
Yingyi Zhang and the ihun Team
Dear Yilun, Competition Committee, and all participants:
I am lizhipeng, a member of ihun team, first of all, I would like to apologise to the organising committee and all the participating teams for the problems that occurred during this tournament.
The accounts lizhipeng and li_zhi_peng were registered for different members of our team. As it was my first time to participate in a KDD competition, I didn’t understand the team mechanics and rules of the tournament, which led to lizhipeng and li_zhi_peng being in different teams. I am very sorry for what happened. Meanwhile, in fact, in Stage 1, the four of us were in the tournament together, but at that time, the results were very poor, and the organising committee didn’t announce the cut-off line for Stage 2, so we were very unconfident to enter Stage 2.
After Stage 2, I immediately used my li_zh_peng account’s google mail to send a message to the official email address yilun.jin@connect.ust.hk. I sent an explanation email and our proposed solution, and we used the account lizhipeng to Google Forms to filled in the submission ID of the competition with the worst result, hoping that our remedial measures would not affect other participants.
Finally, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to the organisers for providing such a valuable platform for us to challenge real-world problems, as well as to ourselves for our hard work and relentless pursuit in the past two months.
