In online advertising, the inherent complexity and dynamic nature of advertising environments necessitate the use of auto-bidding services to assist advertisers in bid optimization. This complexity is further compounded in multi-channel scenarios, where effective allocation of budgets and constraints across channels with distinct behavioral patterns becomes critical for optimizing return on investment. Current approaches predominantly rely on either optimization-based strategies or reinforcement learning techniques. However, optimization-based methods lack flexibility in adapting to dynamic market conditions, while reinforcement learning approaches often struggle to capture essential historical dependencies and observational patterns within the constraints of Markov Decision Process frameworks. To address these limitations, we propose AHBid, an Adaptable Hierarchical Bidding framework that integrates generative planning with real-time control. The framework employs a high-level generative planner based on diffusion models to dynamically allocate budgets and constraints by effectively capturing historical context and temporal patterns. We introduce a constraint enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance with specified constraints, along with a trajectory refinement mechanism that enhances adaptability to environmental changes through the utilization of historical data. The system further incorporates a control-based bidding algorithm that synergistically combines historical knowledge with real-time information, significantly improving both adaptability and operational efficacy. Extensive experiments conducted on large-scale offline datasets and through online A/B tests demonstrate the effectiveness of AHBid, yielding a 13.57% increase in overall return compared to existing baselines.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Illustration of auto-bidding system applications in multi-channel scenarios.
Figure 2. Comparative analysis of advertising performance across channels.
Figure 3. The overall procedure of AHBid. During training, the planner incrementally adds noise to goal trajectories and learns denoising-based reconstruction. During inference, it iteratively denoises and refines a sampled trajectory using historical data from prior stages. The optimized trajectory subsequently guides the auto-bidder in adjusting parameters and determining real-time optimal bids. framework
Auto-bidding systems optimize bids to maximize value under efficiency constraints such as Cost-Per-Action (CPA). Existing methods treat each day as an independent episode. However, many advertisers produce value so sparsely that per-day efficiency ratios become statistically unreliable, undermining advertiser retention. Platforms therefore evaluate window-level efficiency over sliding windows of W=7 days, ensuring fair evaluation and long-term advertising effectiveness. This creates cross-episode coupling: each day's bidding decisions affect up to W overlapping windows, so setting daily targets requires anticipating future market conditions. We propose SWAG-Bid (Sliding-Window Aware Generative Auto-Bidding), a hierarchical framework decomposing this challenge into episode-level planning and step-level execution. The planner uses a Masked Trajectory Model to forecast markets and generate candidate plans, scored across all overlapping windows by Multi-Window Model Predictive Control Sampling (MWMS) with exponential confidence decay. The controller adjusts reliance on this guidance through a state-adaptive gate, Per-Step Gated Adaptive Layer Normalization (PSG-AdaLN), complemented by Return-to-Go and Cost-to-Go channels carrying budget and constraint information. Experiments on AuctionNet-Sparse and online A/B tests on AliExpress show that SWAG-Bid achieves competitive constraint satisfaction and value acquisition under sliding-window evaluation.
Binglin Wu, Chuan Yue, Yingyi Zhang +4
Dalian University of Technology · Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group · Dalian University of Technology & City University of Hong Kong
Auto-bidding services optimize real-time bidding strategies for advertisers under key performance indicator (KPI) constraints such as target return on investment and budget. However, uncertainties such as model prediction errors and feedback latency can cause bidding strategies to deviate from ex-post optimality, leading to inefficient allocation. To address this issue, we propose JD-BP, a Joint generative Decision framework for Bidding and Pricing. Unlike prior methods, JD-BP jointly outputs a bid value and a pricing correction term that acts additively with the payment rule such as GSP. To mitigate adverse effects of historical constraint violations, we design a memory-less Return-to-Go that encourages future value maximizing of bidding actions while the cumulated bias is handled by the pricing correction. Moreover, a trajectory augmentation algorithm is proposed to generate joint bidding-pricing trajectories from a (possibly arbitrary) base bidding policy, enabling efficient plug-and-play deployment of our algorithm from existing RL/generative bidding models. Finally, we employ an Energy-Based Direct Preference Optimization method in conjunction with a cross-attention module to enhance the joint learning performance of bidding and pricing correction. Offline experiments on the AuctionNet dataset demonstrate that JD-BP achieves state-of-the-art performance. Online A/B tests at JD.com confirm its practical effectiveness, showing a 4.70% increase in ad revenue and a 6.48% improvement in target cost.
Linghui Meng, Chun Gan, Shengsheng Niu +8
JD.com China · The Chinese University of Hong Kong China
Auto-bidding systems aim to maximize advertiser value over long horizons under budget constraints and ratio targets such as cost-per-acquisition, yet future traffic and auction dynamics are non-stationary and uncertain. Existing approaches face distinct limitations: control-based pacing reacts to deviations but cannot anticipate future conditions, while RL and generative methods fold constraints into reward signals, obscuring violations and degrading under distribution shift. We shift the learning target from actions to responses with the Generative Response Model (GRM), a history-conditioned sequence model that jointly predicts future traffic volume and horizon-aggregate cost/value curves as functions of a single bid multiplier. We show that under mild monotonicity conditions, the optimality gap relative to full per-tick control is bounded by the dispersion of per-tick marginal value-per-cost. Given predicted responses, a lightweight analytic controller enforces each active constraint via a 1D root-finding step. We prove this controller is exact for the single-multiplier problem and bound constraint violations under receding-horizon replanning in terms of prediction error. Experiments on AuctionNet show that GRM improves constraint stability and overall score compared to existing baselines.