Auto-bidding plays an essential role in online advertising, allowing agents to automatically adjust bids for advertisers. Recently, the rise of Marketing Management service in e-commerce platforms has driven the evolution from auto-bidding to auto-marketing, enabling merchants to delegate their advertising bidding and product's coupon discounting decisions to agents. Auto-marketing requires agents to jointly decide on bidding and coupon discounting. Furthermore, compared to classic static constraints, auto-marketing agent faces a self-funding constraint (where the budget for both bidding and coupon discounting is entirely derived from the agent's commission revenue). Existing rule-based or RL-based methods often struggle with dynamic environments and complex sequential dependencies. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Generative Auto-Marketing framework (GAM), designed for performing joint sequential decisions on bidding and coupon discounting, and optimizing business objectives through post-training alignment. Furthermore, GAM employs a flexible, constraint-aware reward alignment module, and utilizes Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to align the pre-trained model, thus empirically balancing objective maximization and constraint satisfaction. We construct an offline simulation environment based on large-scale real-world dataset, and demonstrate the effectiveness of GAM through extensive experimental results.

Identifying high-revenue mechanisms that are both dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) and individually rational (IR) is a fundamental challenge in auction design. While theoretical approaches have encountered bottlenecks in multi-item combinatorial auctions, there has been much empirical progress in the automated design of such mechanisms using machine learning. However, existing research primarily focuses on randomized auctions, with less attention given to more practical deterministic auctions. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce OD-VVCA, an objective decomposition approach for automated designing revenue-maximizing deterministic Virtual Valuations Combinatorial Auctions (VVCAs), which are inherently DSIC and IR. We use a parallelizable dynamic programming algorithm to compute the allocation and revenue outcomes of a VVCA efficiently. We then decompose the revenue objective function into continuous and piecewise-constant discontinuous components, optimizing each using distinct methods. Extensive experiments show that OD-VVCA achieves high revenue in multi-item auctions, especially in large-scale settings where it outperforms both randomized and deterministic baselines, indicating its efficacy and scalability.

Optimizing the advertiser's cumulative value of winning impressions under budget constraints poses a complex challenge in online advertising, under the paradigm of AI-Generated Bidding (AIGB). Advertisers often have personalized objectives but limited historical interaction data, resulting in few-shot scenarios where traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle to perform effectively. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative for AIGB by leveraging their in-context learning capabilities to generalize from limited data. However, they lack the numerical precision required for fine-grained optimization. To address this limitation, we introduce GRPO-Adaptive, an efficient LLM post-training strategy that enhances both reasoning and numerical precision by dynamically updating the reference policy during training. Built upon this foundation, we further propose DARA, a novel dual-phase framework that decomposes the decision-making process into two stages: a few-shot reasoner that generates initial plans via in-context prompting, and a fine-grained optimizer that refines these plans using feedback-driven reasoning. This separation allows DARA to combine LLMs' in-context learning strengths with precise adaptability required by AIGB tasks. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic data environments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines in terms of cumulative advertiser value under budget constraints.

The canonical model for multi-channel marketing, Bandits with Knapsacks (BwK), optimizes cumulative rewards subject to resource constraints but typically assumes a fixed, exogenous budget. This assumption is tenuous in real-world systems requiring performance-adaptive investment, where pre-committing to a budget is challenging and suboptimal. We introduce Marketing Hosting, a paradigm modeling the budget as an endogenous, performance-dependent variable. This yields a new problem class, Bandits with Endogenous Knapsacks (BwEK), characterized by a challenging feedback loop coupling rewards with constraints. We develop a specialized primal-dual algorithm to manage this coupling. For settings with hard, per-round constraints, we design a novel risk-aware algorithm that mitigates the path-dependent risk of ruin, providing the first high-probability safety guarantee for such problems. Finally, we solve the strategic bi-level problem of learning the optimal reinvestment rate. We validate our theoretical results through extensive simulations, real-world data experiments, and a live A/B test.

On e-commerce platforms, sellers typically bid for impressions from ad traffic to promote their products. However, for most sellers, the majority of their sales come from organic traffic. Consequently, the relationship between their ad spending and total sales remains uncertain, resulting in operational inefficiency. To address this issue, e-commerce platforms have recently introduced a novel platform-wide marketing service known as QuanZhanTui, which has reportedly enhanced marketing efficiency for sellers and driven substantial revenue growth for platforms. QuanZhanTui allows sellers to bid for impressions from the platform's entire traffic to boost their total sales without compromising the platform's user experience. In this paper, we investigate the mechanism design problem that arises from QuanZhanTui. The problem is formulated as a multi-objective optimization to balance sellers' welfare and platform's user experience. We first introduce the stock-constrained value maximizer model, which reflects sellers' dual requirements on marketing efficiency and platform-wide ROI. Then, we propose the Liquid Payment Auction (LPA), an auction designed to optimize the balanced objectives while accounting for sellers' requirements in the auto-bidding environment. It employs a simple payment rule based on sellers' liquid welfare, providing a clearer link between their investment and total sales. Under mild assumptions, we theoretically prove desirable properties of LPA, such as optimality and incentive compatibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate LPA's superior performance over conventional auctions in QuanZhanTui.

In online advertising, advertisers commonly utilize auto-bidding services to bid for impression opportunities. A typical objective of the auto-bidder is to optimize the advertiser's cumulative value of winning impressions within specified budget constraints. However, such a problem is challenging due to the complex bidding environment faced by diverse advertisers. To address this challenge, we introduce ABPlanner, a few-shot adaptable budget planner designed to improve budget-constrained auto-bidding. ABPlanner is based on a hierarchical bidding framework that decomposes the bidding process into shorter, manageable stages. Within this framework, ABPlanner allocates the budget across all stages, allowing a low-level auto-bidder to bids based on the budget allocation plan. The adaptability of ABPlanner is achieved through a sequential decision-making approach, inspired by in-context reinforcement learning. For each advertiser, ABPlanner adjusts the budget allocation plan episode by episode, using data from previous episodes as prompt for current decisions. This enables ABPlanner to quickly adapt to different advertisers with few-shot data, providing a sample-efficient solution. Extensive simulation experiments and real-world A/B testing validate the effectiveness of ABPlanner, demonstrating its capability to enhance the cumulative value achieved by auto-bidders.

Auto-bidding is crucial in facilitating online advertising by automatically providing bids for advertisers. While previous work has made great efforts to model bidding environments for better ad performance, it has limitations in generalizability across environments since these models are typically tailored for specific bidding scenarios. To this end, we approach the scenario-independent principles through a unified function that estimates the achieved effect under specific bids, such as budget consumption, gross merchandise volume (GMV), page views, etc. Then, we propose a bidding foundation model Bid2X to learn this fundamental function from data in various scenarios. Our Bid2X is built over uniform series embeddings that encode heterogeneous data through tailored embedding methods. To capture complex inter-variable and dynamic temporal dependencies in bidding data, we propose two attention mechanisms separately treating embeddings of different variables and embeddings at different times as attention tokens for representation learning. On top of the learned variable and temporal representations, a variable-aware fusion module is used to perform adaptive bidding outcome prediction. To model the unique bidding data distribution, we devise a zero-inflated projection module to incorporate the estimated non-zero probability into its value prediction, which makes up a joint optimization objective containing classification and regression. The objective is proven to converge to the zero-inflated distribution.

The standard framework of online bidding algorithm design assumes that the seller commits himself to faithfully implementing the rules of the adopted auction.However, the seller may attempt to cheat in execution to increase his revenue if the auction belongs to the class of non-credible auctions.For example, in a second-price auction, the seller could create a fake bid between the highest bid and the second highest bid.This paper focuses on one such case of online bidding in repeated second-price auctions.At each time 𝑡, the winner with bid 𝑏 𝑡 is charged not the highest competing bid 𝑑 𝑡 but a manipulated price 𝑝 𝑡 = 𝛼 0 𝑑 𝑡 + (1 -𝛼 0 )𝑏 𝑡 , where the parameter 𝛼 0 ∈ [0, 1] in essence measures the seller's credibility.Unlike classic repeated-auction settings where the bidder has access to samples (𝑑 𝑠 ) 𝑡 -1 𝑠=1 , she can only receive mixed signals of𝑠=1 and 𝛼 0 in this problem.The task for the bidder is to learn not only the bid distributions of her competitors but also the seller's credibility.We establish regret lower bounds in various information models and provide corresponding online bidding algorithms that can achieve near-optimal performance.Specifically, * Both authors contributed equally to this research.

Auto-bidding plays a crucial role in facilitating online advertising by automatically providing bids for advertisers. Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained popularity for auto-bidding. However, most current RL auto-bidding methods are modeled through the Markovian Decision Process (MDP), which assumes the Markovian state transition. This assumption restricts the ability to perform in long horizon scenarios and makes the model unstable when dealing with highly random online advertising environments. To tackle this issue, this paper introduces AI-Generated Bidding (AIGB), a novel paradigm for auto-bidding through generative modeling. In this paradigm, we propose DiffBid, a conditional diffusion modeling approach for bid generation. DiffBid directly models the correlation between the return and the entire trajectory, effectively avoiding error propagation across time steps in long horizons. Additionally, DiffBid offers a versatile approach for generating trajectories that maximize given targets while adhering to specific constraints. Extensive experiments conducted on the real-world dataset and online A/B test on Alibaba advertising platform demonstrate the effectiveness of DiffBid, achieving 2.81% increase in GMV and 3.36% increase in ROI.

Decision-making in large-scale games is an essential research area in artificial intelligence (AI) with significant real-world impact. However, the limited access to realistic large-scale game environments has hindered research progress in this area. In this paper, we present AuctionNet, a benchmark for bid decision-making in large-scale ad auctions derived from a real-world online advertising platform. AuctionNet is composed of three parts: an ad auction environment, a pre-generated dataset based on the environment, and performance evaluations of several baseline bid decision-making algorithms. More specifically, the environment effectively replicates the integrity and complexity of real-world ad auctions through the interaction of several modules: the ad opportunity generation module employs deep generative networks to bridge the gap between simulated and real-world data while mitigating the risk of sensitive data exposure; the bidding module implements diverse auto-bidding agents trained with different decision-making algorithms; and the auction module is anchored in the classic Generalized Second Price (GSP) auction but also allows for customization of auction mechanisms as needed. To facilitate research and provide insights into the environment, we have also pre-generated a substantial dataset based on the environment. The dataset contains 10 million ad opportunities, 48 diverse auto-bidding agents, and over 500 million auction records. Performance evaluations of baseline algorithms such as linear programming, reinforcement learning, and generative models for bid decision-making are also presented as a part of AuctionNet. AuctionNet has powered the NeurIPS 2024 Auto-Bidding in Large-Scale Auctions competition, providing competition environments for over 1,500 teams. We believe that AuctionNet is applicable not only to research on bid decision-making in ad auctions but also to the general area of decision-making in large-scale games. Code: https://github.com/alimama-tech/AuctionNet.

In online advertising, advertisers participate in ad auctions to acquire ad opportunities, often by utilizing auto-bidding tools provided by demand-side platforms (DSPs). The current auto-bidding algorithms typically employ reinforcement learning (RL). However, due to safety concerns, most RL-based auto-bidding policies are trained in simulation, leading to a performance degradation when deployed in online environments. To narrow this gap, we can deploy multiple auto-bidding agents in parallel to collect a large interaction dataset. Offline RL algorithms can then be utilized to train a new policy. The trained policy can subsequently be deployed for further data collection, resulting in an iterative training framework, which we refer to as iterative offline RL. In this work, we identify the performance bottleneck of this iterative offline RL framework, which originates from the ineffective exploration and exploitation caused by the inherent conservatism of offline RL algorithms. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose Trajectory-wise Exploration and Exploitation (TEE), which introduces a novel data collecting and data utilization method for iterative offline RL from a trajectory perspective. Furthermore, to ensure the safety of online exploration while preserving the dataset quality for TEE, we propose Safe Exploration by Adaptive Action Selection (SEAS). Both offline experiments and real-world experiments on Alibaba display advertising platform demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

On typical e-commerce platforms, a product can be displayed to users in two possible forms, as an ad item or an organic item. Usually, ad and organic items are separately selected by the advertising system and recommendation system, and then combined by a content merging mechanism. Although the design of the content merging mechanism has been extensively studied, little attention has been given to a crucial situation where there is an overlap between candidate ad and organic items. Despite its common occurrence, this situation is not correctly handled by almost all existing works, potentially leading to incentive problems for advertisers and the violation of economic constraints. To address these issues, we revisit the design of the content merging mechanism. We introduce a necessary property called form stability, and provide simplification results of the mechanism design problem. Furthermore, we design two simple mechanisms strictly ensuring desired economic properties including incentive compatibility, and demonstrate their guaranteed performance through competitive ratio analysis under certain conditions.

Online bidding and auction are crucial aspects of the online advertising industry. Conventionally, there is only one slot for ad display and most current studies focus on it. Nowadays, multi-slot display advertising is gradually becoming popular where many ads could be displayed in a list and shown as a whole to users. However, multi-slot display advertising leads to different cost-effectiveness. Advertisers have the incentive to adjust bid prices so as to win the most economical ad positions. In this study, we introduce bid shading into multi-slot display advertising for bid price adjustment with a Multi-task End-to-end Bid Shading~(MEBS) method. We prove the optimality of our method theoretically and examine its performance experimentally. Through extensive offline and online experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method, and we obtain a 7.01% lift in Gross Merchandise Volume, a 7.42% lift in Return on Investment, and a 3.26% lift in ad buy count.

Automated bidding, an emerging intelligent decision-making paradigm powered by machine learning, has become popular in online advertising. Advertisers in automated bidding evaluate the cumulative utilities and have private financial constraints over multiple ad auctions in a long-term period. Based on these distinct features, we consider a new ad auction model for automated bidding: the values of advertisers are public while the financial constraints, such as budget and return on investment (ROI) rate, are private types. We derive the truthfulness conditions with respect to private constraints for this multi-dimensional setting, and demonstrate any feasible allocation rule could be equivalently reduced to a series of non-decreasing functions on budget. However, the resulted allocation mapped from these non-decreasing functions generally follows an irregular shape, making it difficult to obtain a closed-form expression for the auction objective. To overcome this design difficulty, we propose a family of truthful automated bidding auction with personalized rank scores, similar to the Generalized Second-Price (GSP) auction. The intuition behind our design is to leverage personalized rank scores as the criteria to allocate items, and compute a critical ROI to transforms the constraints on budget to the same dimension as ROI. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed auction mechanism outperforms the widely used ad auctions, such as first-price auction and second-price auction, in various automated bidding environments.

Powered by machine learning techniques, online advertising platforms have launched various automated bidding strategy services to facilitate intelligent decision-making for advertisers. However, advertisers experience heterogeneous advertising environments, and thus the unified bidding strategies widely used in both academia and industry suffer from severe unfairness issues, resulting in significant ad performance disparity among advertisers. In this work, to resolve the unfairness issue and improve the overall system performance, we propose a personalized automated bidding framework, namely PerBid, shifting the classical automated bidding strategy with a unified agent to multiple context-aware agents corresponding to different advertiser clusters. Specifically, we first design an ad campaign profiling network to model dynamic advertising environments. By clustering the advertisers with similar profiles and generating context-aware automated bidding agents for each cluster, we can match advertisers with personalized automated bidding strategies. Experiments conducted on the real-world dataset and online A/B test on Alibaba display advertising platform demonstrate the effectiveness of PerBid in improving overall ad performance and guaranteeing fairness among heterogeneous advertisers.

In online e-commerce platforms, sponsored ads are always mixed with non-sponsored organic content (recommended items). To guarantee user experience, online platforms always impose strict limitations on the number of ads displayed, becoming the bottleneck for advertising revenue. To boost advertising space, we introduce a novel advertising business paradigm called Augment Advertising, where once a user clicks on a leading ad on the main page, instead of being shown the corresponding products, a collection of mini-detail ads relevant to the clicked ad is displayed. A key component for augment advertising is to design ad auctions to jointly select leading ads on the main page and mini-detail ads on the augment ad page. In this work, we decouple the ad auction into a two-stage auction, including a leading ad auction and a mini-detail ad auction. We design the Potential Generalized Second Price (PGSP) auction with Symmetric Nash Equilibrium (SNE) for leading ads, and adopt GSP auction for mini-detail ads. We have deployed augment advertising on Taobao advertising platform, and conducted extensive offline evaluations and online A/B tests. The evaluation results show that augment advertising could guarantee user experience while improving the ad revenue and the PGSP auction outperforms baselines in terms of revenue and user experience in augment advertising.

A contemporary feed application usually provides blended results of organic items and sponsored items~(ads) to users. Conventionally, ads are exposed at fixed positions. Such a fixed ad exposure strategy is inefficient due to ignoring users' personalized preferences towards ads. To this end,adaptive ad exposure is becoming an appealing strategy to boost the overall performance of the feed. However, existing approaches to implement the adaptive ad exposure strategy suffer from several limitations: 1) they usually fall into sub-optimal solutions because of only focusing on request-level optimization without consideration of the application-level performance and constraints, 2) they neglect the necessity of keeping the game-theoretical properties of ad auctions, and 3) they can hardly be deployed in large-scale applications due to high computational complexity. In this paper, we focus on the application-level performance optimization under hierarchical constraints in feeds and formulate adaptive ad exposure as a Dynamic Knapsack Problem. We propose Hierarchically Constrained Adaptive Ad Exposure~(HCA2E) that possesses the desirable game-theoretical properties, computational efficiency, and performance robustness. Comprehensive offline and online experiments on a leading e-commerce application demonstrate the performance superiority of HCA2E.

Recently, auto-bidding technique has become an essential tool to increase the revenue of advertisers. Facing the complex and ever-changing bidding environments in the real-world advertising system (RAS), state-of-the-art auto-bidding policies usually leverage reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to generate real-time bids on behalf of the advertisers. Due to safety concerns, it was believed that the RL training process can only be carried out in an offline virtual advertising system (VAS) that is built based on the historical data generated in the RAS. In this paper, we argue that there exists significant gaps between the VAS and RAS, making the RL training process suffer from the problem of inconsistency between online and offline (IBOO). Firstly, we formally define the IBOO and systematically analyze its causes and influences. Then, to avoid the IBOO, we propose a sustainable online RL (SORL) framework that trains the auto-bidding policy by directly interacting with the RAS, instead of learning in the VAS. Specifically, based on our proof of the Lipschitz smooth property of the Q function, we design a safe and efficient online exploration (SER) policy for continuously collecting data from the RAS. Meanwhile, we derive the theoretical lower bound on the safety degree of the SER policy. We also develop a variance-suppressed conservative Q-learning (V-CQL) method to effectively and stably learn the auto-bidding policy with the collected data. Finally, extensive simulated and real-world experiments validate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art auto-bidding algorithm.

In online advertising, auto-bidding has become an essential tool for advertisers to optimize their preferred ad performance metrics by simply expressing high-level campaign objectives and constraints. Previous works designed auto-bidding tools from the view of single-agent, without modeling the mutual influence between agents. In this paper, we instead consider this problem from a distributed multi-agent perspective, and propose a general \underlineM ulti-\underlineA gent reinforcement learning framework for \underlineA uto-\underlineB idding, namely MAAB, to learn the auto-bidding strategies. First, we investigate the competition and cooperation relation among auto-bidding agents, and propose a temperature-regularized credit assignment to establish a mixed cooperative-competitive paradigm. By carefully making a competition and cooperation trade-off among agents, we can reach an equilibrium state that guarantees not only individual advertiser's utility but also the system performance (i.e., social welfare). Second, to avoid the potential collusion behaviors of bidding low prices underlying the cooperation, we further propose bar agents to set a personalized bidding bar for each agent, and then alleviate the revenue degradation due to the cooperation. Third, to deploy MAAB in the large-scale advertising system with millions of advertisers, we propose a mean-field approach. By grouping advertisers with the same objective as a mean auto-bidding agent, the interactions among the large-scale advertisers are greatly simplified, making it practical to train MAAB efficiently. Extensive experiments on the offline industrial dataset and Alibaba advertising platform demonstrate that our approach outperforms several baseline methods in terms of social welfare and revenue.

Most machine learning classifiers only concern classification accuracy, while certain applications (such as medical diagnosis, meteorological forecasting, and computation advertising) require the model to predict the true probability, known as a calibrated estimate. In previous work, researchers have developed several calibration methods to post-process the outputs of a predictor to obtain calibrated values, such as binning and scaling methods. Compared with scaling, binning methods are shown to have distribution-free theoretical guarantees, which motivates us to prefer binning methods for calibration. However, we notice that existing binning methods have several drawbacks: (a) the binning scheme only considers the original prediction values, thus limiting the calibration performance; and (b) the binning approach is non-individual, mapping multiple samples in a bin to the same value, and thus is not suitable for order-sensitive applications. In this paper, we propose a feature-aware binning framework, called Multiple Boosting Calibration Trees (MBCT), along with a multi-view calibration loss to tackle the above issues. Our MBCT optimizes the binning scheme by the tree structures of features, and adopts a linear function in a tree node to achieve individual calibration. Our MBCT is non-monotonic, and has the potential to improve order accuracy, due to its learnable binning scheme and the individual calibration. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three datasets in different fields. Results show that our method outperforms all competing models in terms of both calibration error and order accuracy. We also conduct simulation experiments, justifying that the proposed multi-view calibration loss is a better metric in modeling calibration error. In addition, our approach is deployed in a real-world online advertising platform; an A/B test over two weeks further demonstrates the effectiveness and great business value of our approach.

For the scalability of industrial online advertising systems, a two-stage auction architecture is widely used to enable efficient ad allocation on a large set of corpus within a limited response time. The current deployed two-stage ad auction usually retrieves an ad subset by a coarse ad quality metric in a pre-auction stage, and then determines the auction outcome by a refined metric in the subsequent stage. However, this simple and greedy solution suffers from performance degradation, as it regards the decision in each stage separately, leading to an improper ad selection metric for the pre-auction stage. In this work, we explicitly investigate the relation between the coarse and refined ad quality metrics, and design a two-stage ad auction by taking the decision interaction between the two stages into account. We decouple the design of the two-stage auction by solving a stochastic subset selection problem in the pre-auction stage and conducting a general second price (GSP) auction in the second stage. We demonstrate that this decouple still preserves the incentive compatibility of the auction mechanism. As the proposed formulation of the pre-auction stage is an NP-hard problem, we propose a scalable approximation solution by defining a new subset selection metric, namely Pre-Auction Score (PAS). Experiment results on both public and industrial dataset demonstrate the improvement on social welfare and revenue of the proposed two-stage ad auction, than the intuitive greedy two-stage auction and other baselines.

Advertising expenditures have become the major source of revenue for e-commerce platforms. Providing good advertising experiences for advertisers by reducing their costs of trial and error in discovering the optimal advertising strategies is crucial for the long-term prosperity of online advertising. To achieve this goal, the advertising platform needs to identify the advertiser's optimization objectives, and then recommend the corresponding strategies to fulfill the objectives. In this work, we first deploy a prototype of strategy recommender system on Taobao display advertising platform, which indeed increases the advertisers' performance and the platform's revenue, indicating the effectiveness of strategy recommendation for online advertising. We further augment this prototype system by explicitly learning the advertisers' preferences over various advertising performance indicators and then optimization objectives through their adoptions of different recommending advertising strategies. We use contextual bandit algorithms to efficiently learn the advertisers' preferences and maximize the recommendation adoption, simultaneously. Simulation experiments based on Taobao online bidding data show that the designed algorithms can effectively optimize the strategy adoption rate of advertisers.

In online display advertising, advertisers usually participate in real-time bidding to acquire ad impression opportunities. In most advertising platforms, a typical impression acquiring demand of advertisers is to maximize the sum value of winning impressions under budget and some key performance indicators constraints, (e.g. maximizing clicks with the constraints of budget and cost per click upper bound). The demand can be various in value type (e.g. ad exposure/click), constraint type (e.g. cost per unit value) and constraint number. Existing works usually focus on a specific demand or hardly achieve the optimum. In this paper, we formulate the demand as a constrained bidding problem, and deduce a unified optimal bidding function on behalf of an advertiser. The optimal bidding function facilitates an advertiser calculating bids for all impressions with only m parameters, where m is the constraint number. However, in real application, it is non-trivial to determine the parameters due to the non-stationary auction environment. We further propose a reinforcement learning (RL) method to dynamically adjust parameters to achieve the optimum, whose converging efficiency is significantly boosted by the recursive optimization property in our formulation. We name the formulation and the RL method, together, as Unified Solution to Constrained Bidding (USCB). USCB is verified to be effective on industrial datasets and is deployed in Alibaba display advertising platform.

In e-commerce advertising, it is crucial to jointly consider various performance metrics, e.g., user experience, advertiser utility, and platform revenue. Traditional auction mechanisms, such as GSP and VCG auctions, can be suboptimal due to their fixed allocation rules to optimize a single performance metric (e.g., revenue or social welfare). Recently, data-driven auctions, learned directly from auction outcomes to optimize multiple performance metrics, have attracted increasing research interests. However, the procedure of auction mechanisms involves various discrete calculation operations, making it challenging to be compatible with continuous optimization pipelines in machine learning. In this paper, we design Deep Neural Auctions (DNAs) to enable end-to-end auction learning by proposing a differentiable model to relax the discrete sorting operation, a key component in auctions. We optimize the performance metrics by developing deep models to efficiently extract contexts from auctions, providing rich features for auction design. We further integrate the game theoretical conditions within the model design, to guarantee the stability of the auctions. DNAs have been successfully deployed in the e-commerce advertising system at Taobao. Experimental evaluation results on both large-scale data set as well as online A/B test demonstrated that DNAs significantly outperformed other mechanisms widely adopted in industry.

In e-commerce advertising, the ad platform usually relies on auction mechanisms to optimize different performance metrics, such as user experience, advertiser utility, and platform revenue. However, most of the state-of-the-art auction mechanisms only focus on optimizing a single performance metric, e.g., either social welfare or revenue, and are not suitable for e-commerce advertising with various, dynamic, difficult to estimate, and even conflicting performance metrics. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism called Deep GSP auction, which leverages deep learning to design new rank score functions within the celebrated GSP auction framework. These new rank score functions are implemented via deep neural network models under the constraints of monotone allocation and smooth transition. The requirement of monotone allocation ensures Deep GSP auction nice game theoretical properties, while the requirement of smooth transition guarantees the advertiser utilities would not fluctuate too much when the auction mechanism switches among candidate mechanisms to achieve different optimization objectives. We deployed the proposed mechanisms in a leading e-commerce ad platform and conducted comprehensive experimental evaluations with both offline simulations and online A/B tests. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the Deep GSP auction compared to the state-of-the-art auction mechanisms.

To drive purchase in online advertising, it is of the advertiser's great interest to optimize the sequential advertising strategy whose performance and interpretability are both important. The lack of interpretability in existing deep reinforcement learning methods makes it not easy to understand, diagnose and further optimize the strategy.In this paper, we propose our Deep Intents Sequential Advertising (DISA) method to address these issues. The key part of interpretability is to understand a consumer's purchase intent which is, however, unobservable (called hidden states). In this paper, we model this intention as a latent variable and formulate the problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) where the underlying intents are inferred based on the observable behaviors. Large-scale industrial offline and online experiments demonstrate our method's superior performance over several baselines. The inferred hidden states are analyzed, and the results prove the rationality of our inference.

In E-commerce, advertising is essential for merchants to reach their target users. The typical objective is to maximize the advertiser’s cumulative revenue over a period of time under a budget constraint. In real applications, an advertisement (ad) usually needs to be exposed to the same user multiple times until the user finally contributes revenue (e.g., places an order). However, existing advertising systems mainly focus on the immediate revenue with single ad exposures, ignoring the contribution of each exposure to the final conversion, thus usually falls into suboptimal solutions. In this paper, we formulate the sequential advertising strategy optimization as a dynamic knapsack problem. We propose a theoretically guaranteed bilevel optimization framework, which significantly reduces the solution space of the original optimization space while ensuring the solution quality. To improve the exploration efficiency of reinforcement learning, we also devise an effective action space reduction approach. Extensive offline and online experiments show the superior performance of our approaches over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of cumulative revenue.

Most e-commerce product feeds provide blended results of advertised products and recommended products to consumers. The underlying advertising and recommendation platforms share similar if not exactly the same set of candidate products. Consumers' behaviors on the advertised results constitute part of the recommendation model's training data and therefore can influence the recommended results. We refer to this process as Leverage. Considering this mechanism, we propose a novel perspective that advertisers can strategically bid through the advertising platform to optimize their recommended organic traffic. By analyzing the real-world data, we first explain the principles of Leverage mechanism, i.e., the dynamic models of Leverage. Then we introduce a novel Leverage optimization problem and formulate it with a Markov Decision Process. To deal with the sample complexity challenge in model-free reinforcement learning, we propose a novel Hybrid Training Leverage Bidding (HTLB) algorithm which combines the real-world samples and the emulator-generated samples to boost the learning speed and stability. Our offline experiments as well as the results from the online deployment demonstrate the superior performance of our approach.

In E-commerce advertising, where product recommendations and product ads are presented to users simultaneously, the traditional setting is to display ads at fixed positions. However, under such a setting, the advertising system loses the flexibility to control the number and positions of ads, resulting in sub-optimal platform revenue and user experience. Consequently, major e-commerce platforms (e.g., Taobao.com) have begun to consider more flexible ways to display ads. In this paper, we investigate the problem of advertising with adaptive exposure: can we dynamically determine the number and positions of ads for each user visit under certain business constraints so that the platform revenue can be increased? More specifically, we consider two types of constraints: request-level constraint ensures user experience for each user visit, and platform-level constraint controls the overall platform monetization rate. We model this problem as a Constrained Markov Decision Process with per-state constraint (psCMDP) and propose a constrained two-level reinforcement learning approach to decompose the original problem into two relatively independent sub-problems. To accelerate policy learning, we also devise a constrained hindsight experience replay mechanism. Experimental evaluations on industry-scale real-world datasets demonstrate the merits of our approach in both obtaining higher revenue under the constraints and the effectiveness of the constrained hindsight experience replay mechanism.