Online Advertising

Follow this topic Ask about this topic

Momentum

4 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 62

Sep 28, 2026cs.CL

Nürnberg NLP at ChildSafeAds 2026: Structurally Dissimilar Voter Ensembles under Four Levels of Data Access

We describe the Nürnberg NLP system for ChildSafeAds 2026. The shared task asks what a monitoring system for commercial content in child-facing YouTube videos can achieve at a given level of data access. We answer with per-subtask ensembles of nine voters, organised into three branches that differ in backbone, adaptation method and class scope. Selection rests on channel-disjoint cross-validation, with the development set as a transfer check. The system wins two of the three subtasks. Its product-category score (ST2, 0.8243) and its compliance-flag score (ST3, 0.6530) are the best of the 22 final entries, and it places third on the task mean (0.7079). We further compare four access levels and report the cost at test-set scale.

Philipp Steigerwald, Eric Rudolph, Jens Albrecht

Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm

Online Advertising Video Content Moderation Content Moderation

Sep 17, 2026cs.CL

UniPolicy: Unified Objective-Specific Policies for Generative Search Advertising

Search advertising connects user intent with commercial content and plays a critical role in platform monetization. Recent systems typically align pretrained generative models with a single business reward, such as eCPM, or use naive reward fusion for preliminary multi-objective alignment. However, an ideal search advertising system must jointly account for heterogeneous objectives, including relevance, click propensity, and commercial value, to balance user experience and business value while mitigating globally suboptimal performance caused by gradient competition. We propose UniPolicy, an objective-aware multi-policy alignment framework. UniPolicy combines objective-specific prefix tokens, sparse MoE-LoRA routing, and objective-specific residual FFNs to hierarchically decouple parameters within a shared backbone, providing differentiated parameter and policy-expression spaces for different business objectives. It further constructs pairwise preferences from multi-stage behavioral feedback, supplementing the relative preference information in exposed-but-unclicked samples and strengthening the relative advantage of clicked candidates in the generation distribution. At inference, UniPolicy supports parallel, business-customizable multi-policy beam search, flexibly allocating candidate quotas across objectives under a fixed retrieval budget. Large-scale offline experiments show that UniPolicy delivers balanced improvements across multiple metrics while preserving retrieval quality, outperforming single-objective reinforcement learning and naive reward-fusion baselines. In a 7-day online A/B test on a real search advertising system, UniPolicy improves CTR by 0.71%, RPS by 1.58%, and advertising revenue by 1.32%, while maintaining stable serving latency.

Kun Yao, Yuhang Zhou, Yichi Zhang +6

Meituan, Beijing, China

Online Advertising Generative Retrieval Multi-Objective Language Model Alignment RL for Generative Models

Sep 14, 2026cs.IR

PinDCO: Whole-Page Aware Dynamic Creative Optimization at Scale

Recent advances in generative AI have substantially accelerated the creation of high-quality ad creatives, dramatically expanding the number of candidate variants per campaign. This shift increases the need for scalable dynamic creative optimization (DCO) systems that can match creatives to the most relevant audiences under stringent latency and cost constraints. We present PinDCO, a production DCO system for ad creative retrieval and selection on Pinterest, a billion-scale visual discovery platform. PinDCO is built around a Creative Component Fusion Network (CCFN) that performs dynamic creative scoring by modeling each creative component (e.g., image, title, layout) with a dedicated tower, using component-specific hyperparameters to account for differing modeling complexity. The component representations are fused to predict a creative-level score conditioned on the ad-level prediction, and we improve training data quality via an exploration-exploitation strategy. To account for Pinterest's waterfall grid layout, where a creative's rendered size affects nearby content and session-level engagement, we introduce a Pixel-aware Adjustment Module(PAM) that adjusts scores based on creative size to encourage efficient screen real-estate utilization and better whole-page outcomes. To support the large volume of creative candidates, we further employ a lightweight pre-selection model for early pruning, and optimize serving efficiency through caching and dynamic batching. Extensive offline analyses and online A/B experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of PinDCO, yielding a +3.09% lift in ad Click-Through Rate(CTR) with positive whole-page metrics. With the strong performance, we launched PinDCO in the Pinterest Ads platform.

Yu Hao, Yuchun Li, Peimeng Sui +5

Pinterest Inc.

Learning to Rank Online Advertising CTR Prediction

Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

Enabling and Understanding Personalization in AI-Generated Advertising Imagery

Personalized marketing traditionally matches static products to customers, while dynamic creative optimization focuses mainly on AI-driven text personalization or basic product image modifications. We address this gap by developing and implementing an AI-based framework that generates personalized advertising imagery directly from customer data. We evaluate this framework in a two-stage within-subject study with N=100 participants across four products and three levels of personalization, varied by the amount and specificity of customer data used. Participants rated each image on attitude toward the advertisement, attitude toward the product, and purchase intention. Results show that participants perceive differences across personalization levels and evaluate AI-generated advertising imagery most positively at a moderate level of personalization. High personalization increases perceived personalization, which is positively associated with all three outcome measures, but also increases perceived creepiness, which is negatively associated with the outcomes and dominates the total effect.

Victor Kolominsky-Rabas, Leopold Müller, Claudius Budcke +2

University of Bayreuth, Universitätsstraße 30, 95447 Bayreuth, Germany · Fraunhofer FIT, Wittelsbacherring 10, 95444 Bayreuth, Germany

Online Advertising Image Generation

Aug 11, 2026cs.LG

MARCO: Click-Intent Decomposition for Calibrated Ads Conversion Prediction

Not all clicks are equal. Industrial ads ranking decouples conversion probability into click-through rate (CTR) and post-click conversion rate (CVR), yet treats every click as the same event. In reality, users provide a free, self-generated signal of intent through their physical UI interactions. Different click types on the same ad exhibit a 4-fold difference in actual conversion rates. By conflating these signals, the standard CVR model under-predicts high-intent clicks and over-predicts low-intent ones, which is a bias masked by near-perfect aggregate calibration. We propose MARCO (Multi-intent Ads Ranking Composition Optimization), a framework that resolves this bias by decomposing each click by intent. Using the logged click type as a free behavioral label, MARCO trains per-intent CVR heads on homogeneous populations, and at serving time composes their per-intent CVR estimates under a predicted distribution over intents. Theoretically, we prove that decomposition never raises population risk, give the exact headroom under squared loss and non-negativity under the deployed loss, and show through a routing-efficiency dial how much of it reaches serving. Because the population-optimal score is unchanged, any gain is a finite-capacity estimation and calibration effect that we validated both offline and online. For deployment at scale, we further cast multi-impression, multi-click attribution as credit assignment with a bias-variance tradeoff analogous to RL return estimation, showing last-impression, first-click attribution is the low-bias, low-variance, deterministic choice under production constraints, and derive three consistency conditions enforced end-to-end at scale. Deployed at binary intent granularity, MARCO corrects per-intent calibration to approximately 100%, lifts conversions per click by +2.80%, and drives +0.98% cumulative improvement in topline metrics.

Shiwen Shen, Xiru Huang, Liang Luo +32

Meta AI, Menlo Park, California, USA

Probability Calibration Online Advertising

Aug 5, 2026cs.LG

Generative Optimization for Incentivized Advertising with Global Level Constraints

Incentivized advertising allocates monetary or virtual rewards to drive user engagement, where a key challenge is optimizing continuous incentive magnitudes under strict global constraints. This problem is complicated by high-frequency interactions, delayed feedback, and non-Markovian user dynamics such as fatigue, which limit the effectiveness of existing uplift modeling and constrained reinforcement learning approaches. To address these challenges, we propose GOAL, a constraint-aware generative framework that formulates incentive allocation as a conditional sequence generation problem. GOAL directly generates incentive magnitudes conditioned on user histories and system-level global pressure, and integrates a hierarchical causal state encoder to capture both local behavioral dynamics and long-range dependencies. To enable flexible constraint control, we introduce \textbf{S}afe \textbf{C}onstrained \textbf{P}olicy \textbf{O}ptimization (SCPO), which learns a single generative policy that generalizes across a spectrum of ROI constraints without retraining. Experiments on large-scale real-world data and a synthetic fatigue-aware environment show that GOAL improves long-term revenue and user retention while substantially reducing ROI violation rates compared to strong baselines.

Gege Chen, Ning Luo, Hao Jiang +7

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Kuaishou Technology

Constrained Generative Modeling Online Advertising Constrained RL

Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

Less Traffic, Better Outcomes: Competition-Aware Request Dispatch in Real-Time Ad Exchanges

Real-time bidding (RTB) ad exchanges typically forward nearly all incoming requests to demand-side platforms (DSPs), even though only a small fraction receive bids. This over-distribution weakens auction outcomes: DSPs throttle participation under compute and budget constraints, reducing the effective use of limited bidding capacity. We present a competition-aware request dispatch framework that uses distributional bid prediction and probabilistic forwarding to decide whether each request should be sent to each DSP. The system adapts per-DSP thresholds over time through lightweight policy optimization to track non-stationary market conditions. We evaluate the framework through four sequential online experiments on a production platform serving over 20 billion daily requests. A full multi-DSP deployment reduces DSP request volume under the policy by 34.2% while increasing net revenue by 4.6% (p<0.001) in a recent 14-day window after an initial DSP adaptation period. Further analysis highlights strong heterogeneity across traffic segments and reveals that aggregate metrics can be misleading. Segment-level and per-DSP analyses suggest that the policy surfaces comparative advantages among DSPs, improving monetized outcomes without increasing overall request volume.

Jonaid Shianifar, Blaz Mramor, Fangda Zou +5

Huawei Ireland Research Center, Dublin, Ireland · Huawei, Nanjing, China

Online Advertising Online Resource Allocation Real-Time Bidding

Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

UniGD: A Unified Generative-Discriminative Framework for Industrial Retrieval

Generative retrieval (GR) is a promising paradigm for industrial search advertising, yet its deployment is constrained by strict relevance and latency requirements. Existing systems cascade GR with an independent relevance model, decoupling the generative likelihood objective from query-ad relevance discrimination, which compromises effectiveness and increases serving costs. We propose a Unified Generative-Discriminative framework (UniGD) that integrates retrieval and relevance scoring within a single model. To mitigate gradient interference in joint optimization, UniGD introduces Conflict-Aware Gradient Enhancement (CAGE) to adaptively coordinate the two objectives. UniGD further designs a Codebook-Anchored Representation Module (CAM) that anchors item representations to frozen hierarchical codebooks distilled from a multimodal pretrained model, thereby endowing them with rich and generalizable semantic priors. For heterogeneous short-video, product, and live-stream ads, UniGD proposes Heterogeneous Ad-material Modeling (HAM), which captures cross-type semantic commonality over a shared backbone while preserving type-specific modeling capacity. Online AB tests on Kuaishou search advertising platform show that UniGD raises ad revenue by 5.78%, reduces inference latency by 33%, and improves discriminative relevance estimation. On NQ320K and MS300K, UniGD improves Recall@10 over the strongest reproduced GR baseline by 8.44% and 3.19%, respectively.

Shujie Ji, Yawei Kong, Yilin Zhao +3

Kuaishou Technology, Beijing, China

Learning to Rank Online Advertising Generative Retrieval

Jul 31, 2026cs.CL

LLM-OSDA: An Optimal-Stopping Dynamic Auction for Native Advertising in Multi-Turn LLM Conversations

LLM-native advertising embeds sponsored content directly into model-generated responses, shifting the unit of sale from a fixed slot to a moment within an evolving conversation. Existing LLM ad-auction mechanisms primarily operate within a single response, settling the winner but not the timing. The extension is nontrivial: with one native insertion opportunity per session, the stopping time depends on bids, coupling timing with allocation, so static truthfulness arguments no longer apply. We propose the LLM-based Optimal Stopping Dynamic Auction (LLM-OSDA), a dynamic cost-per-click auction that integrates Bellman optimal stopping, winner allocation, and envelope pricing. A bid-independent LLM layer estimates contextual click quality and seamlessly renders the winning ad, while bids enter only the committed auction mechanism. Under an exact Bellman oracle, the expected discounted-click allocation is monotone in each advertiser's bid, and the corresponding envelope payment makes truthful bidding weakly dominant in expectation. For practical deployment, a learned StopNet approximates the Bellman action values. We show that its decisions differ from the optimal policy only near the stopping boundary and bound the resulting incentive loss in terms of its approximation error. Experiments on a simulated conversational advertising corpus show that LLM-OSDA improves net revenue by 11 percent over the strongest fixed-timing baseline while maintaining comparable user retention. Code is at https://github.com/2025Fang2025/llm-osda.

Yan Fang, Jialin Chen, Chun Gan +5

1JD.com, Inc. · 2Shanghai University of Finance and Economics · University of Sydney +1

Mechanism Design Online Advertising Optimal Stopping

Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

Evaluating and Pricing Advertisements in AI-Generated Responses

As search increasingly shifts toward LLM-driven answer engines, advertising is becoming embedded within the generated response itself and should therefore be evaluated for both user utility and commercial value. The key challenge is click-through intent: behavioural logs are unavailable, human annotation resists calibration, and frontier LLM judges conflate intent with linguistic fluency. These gaps compound, as principled pricing presupposes a continuous intent signal, while generating such a signal presupposes supervision that is currently unavailable. We construct the missing supervision through a psychologically grounded agent simulation framework, and distil it into a parameter-efficient evaluator that predicts click-through intent, together with the three companion dimensions of ad quality, as smooth, differentiable estimates. Validated through sign-certain behavioural perturbations, the evaluator surpasses frontier zero-shot judges on relevance sensitivity (79% versus 60-67%), tracks graded content degradation, generalises without error to 103 fictional products, and agrees with human preference in 86% of pairwise judgements across five annotators, with agreement rising in the evaluator's confidence. Upon its estimates we build the pricing layer directly, deriving the unique payment rule under which truthful bidding is optimal, demonstrating it on a best-of-k allocation, and extending the mechanism to non-monotone allocations. The same differentiable signal stands ready as a training objective for ad generation.

John L. Turner-Smith, Zimeng Huang, Yuhan Fu +2

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA · College of AI, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Mechanism Design Online Advertising Intent Classification CTR Prediction Automated Evaluation Generative AI Evaluation

Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

PlatformBid: An Auto-Bidding Benchmark from a Unified Advertising Platform's Perspective

Real-time bidding is central to computational advertising, comprising three elements: Supply Side Platform (SSP) selling ad impressions, Demand Side Platform (DSP) bidding for advertisers, and Ad Exchange conducting auctions between them. Traditional auto-bidding algorithms focus solely on the DSP side, maximizing advertiser conversions by adjusting bids against competitors. However, current big ad platforms, such as social media and e-commerce companies, now integrate SSP, DSP, and Ad Exchange functions internally. From such ad platforms' perspective, the goal of the auto-bidding algorithms is not only to maximize the advertisers' conversions, but also the total revenue of the platform. Given the lack of platform-centric evaluation frameworks and the pressing need to advance auto-bidding research, we propose PlatformBid - the first comprehensive benchmark designed from a unified ad platform's perspective. To accurately reflect the real-world auto-bidding scenarios, we define three representative settings: (1) homogeneous competition with identical algorithms across advertisers, (2) heterogeneous competition with diverse algorithmic strategies, and (3) promotional competition where some advertisers surge budgets for boosting sales during promotional events like Black Friday. We systematically evaluate a broad spectrum of existing auto-bidding methods across these settings, encompassing classical control methods, RL-based methods, and recent generative methods. Besides these methods, we further propose a novel auto-bidding method based on flow-matching, termed BidFlow, which leverages the flow-matching method's expressive policy representation to effectively handle dynamic competitive environments. Online experiments on Kuaishou further show a +0.68% improvement in target cost, providing deployment evidence for the offline-online consistency of PlatformBid.

Shengtian Yang, Yewen Li, Peng Jiang +5

Nanyang Technological University Singapore, Singapore

Benchmark Design Automated Bidding Online Advertising Real-Time Bidding

Jul 28, 2026cs.CL

PILA: Plug-and-Play Insertion for LLM-native Advertising

How to monetize large language models (LLMs) by naturally integrating sponsored content into their responses, known as LLM-native advertising, has recently emerged as a critical problem. However, existing solutions entangle advertising with content generation inside a single model, which is incompatible with modern API-only or workflow-based LLM applications and inevitably compromises the original response quality. To address this, we propose PILA, which reformulates ad insertion as a conditional response rewriting problem and decouples it from the upstream service as a lightweight sidecar module. PILA is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated with existing LLM services without modifying the base model or its workflow. It also exposes a controllable trade-off between user-side naturalness and ad-side exposure, offering a practical interface for downstream pricing and deployment. Experiments across diverse upstream models show that \pila consistently improves ad effectiveness while preserving response quality, highlighting its promise as a practical solution for LLM-native advertising.

Zhaowei Zhang, Yuhan Fu, Yihang Zhang +6

Institute for AI, Peking University · College of AI, Tsinghua University · University of Michigan +2

Online Advertising

Jul 28, 2026cs.LG

TWICE: Two-Clock, Two-Window Learning for Long-Horizon Conversion Prediction in Online Advertising

Long-horizon conversion prediction under delayed feedback creates a two-clock, two-window learning problem in online advertising. A short base observation window releases recent clicks on the click clock before their outcomes mature, whereas conversions continue to arrive on the conversion clock throughout a longer target conversion window. The click clock provides timely but partially observed status supervision. The conversion clock reveals long-tail delays, but the delay composition within an arrival-time slice is weighted by historical click cohorts with different traffic volumes and target-window conversion rates. We present TWICE, a framework that factorizes long-horizon post-click conversion rate (CVR) into a target-window conversion probability and a grouped elapsed-delay cumulative distribution function (CDF). The two clocks provide complementary supervision. Click-clock records train the target-window CVR head through a current-status likelihood over the base observation window. Newly arrived conversions train the delay model on the conversion clock. To account for the cohort mixture, TWICE uses fixed click-time predicted CVR (pCVR) mass as cohort exposure in an arrival-conditioned likelihood. This accounts for differences in cohort traffic and conversion propensity. The resulting aggregate records are self-contained. A single learned CDF produces monotone predictions for all requested horizons up to the target conversion window. Serving requires neither historical lookup nor convolution. Experiments on a public benchmark and an industrial advertising dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of TWICE. In an online A/B test in Kwai's advertising system, TWICE increased expected revenue, revenue, and conversions by 2.486%, 1.858%, and 2.061%, respectively. It was subsequently deployed to full traffic.

Kaiyuan Li, Kun Wang, Zhongbo Wang +4

Kuaishou Technology Beijing, China

Online Advertising

Jul 28, 2026cs.CV

Sense it with your eyes: Sensation Generation and Understanding for Advertisements

Sensory advertising evokes human senses through visual cues, enabling audiences to mentally simulate experiences and increasing persuasive impact. Despite the recent increase in using AI in generating and understanding creative and persuasive content, how advertisements visually evoke sensations remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce the first study of understanding, evaluating, and generating sensory ads. We introduce the Sensory Ad dataset, and define sensation classification tasks (SenseClass) to benchmark LLMs and MLLMs. We further propose SenseScore, an automated evaluation metric for sensation evocation achieving strong agreement with human judgments. Finally, we introduce the Sensory Ad Generation (SenseGen) task and propose SAGA, a multi-agent framework that improves message image alignment, sensory evocation, and persuasion. Our work establishes a foundation for sensory-aware visual persuasion.

Aysan Aghazadeh, Sina Malakouti, Adriana Kovashka

University of Pittsburgh

Online Advertising

Jul 28, 2026cs.LG

Beyond Single-Episode Optimization: Sliding-Window Aware Generative Auto-Bidding for Long-Term Advertising Effectiveness

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 Dalian, China · Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group Hangzhou, China · Dalian University of Technology & City University of Hong Kong Dalian, China

Automated Bidding Online Advertising Constrained Optimization

Jul 26, 2026cs.AI

Offline-to-Online Creative Optimization with Generative Models and Adaptive Testing

Ad creative optimization is increasingly constrained by evaluation rather than generation. Generative models can produce many plausible creatives, but reliable evaluation requires online experiments, in which only a limited slate can be tested. We study how to use data from historical A/B tests to generate and select the candidates in that slate. We developed and deployed a performance-driven offline-to-online workflow that guides creative generation with a predictive model as an inference-time critic. In the offline phase, we use a predictive model trained on historical experiments to rank and refine variants created by a generative model. A final test slate is then deployed in an online adaptive experiment. In a 50-arm field experiment, we found that the best creative generated with this method yielded 45.1% higher engagement than the best human-authored creative. Two additional experiments showed the same upper-tail pattern, with lifts of 46.7% and 36.2%. We found that despite the predictive model being too noisy to directly identify the best creative offline, it effectively guides the generative model toward creating strong candidates that can be efficiently evaluated in an adaptive experiment. The results suggest a design principle for creative optimization with generative models: use predictive models to guide generation of a slate to test, judge the slate by whether it contains high-performing candidates at a feasible test size, and use adaptive experiments to select among candidates while limiting traffic lost to weak arms.

Kevin Lee, Benjamin Letham, Zhiyuan Jerry Lin +5

University of Michigan · USA · Meta

Online Advertising Generative Modeling A/b Testing

Jul 25, 2026cs.IR

SMART: LLM-Augmented Hybrid Retrieval for Dynamic Product Ads

Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) require retrieving relevant items from multi-million product catalogs, balancing two competing objectives: retargeting (re-surfacing known interests) and prospecting (discovering new categories). While Large Language Models (LLMs) capture semantic intent better than traditional embedding models, deploying them at scale introduces prohibitive inference costs and lexical mismatch issues. Through controlled experiments on millions of users, we demonstrate a critical retrieval decomposition: rule-generated queries excel at retargeting on a lexical BM25 index, while LLM-generated queries excel at prospecting on a dense ANN index. Building on this, we propose SMART (SeMantic-aware Adaptive ReTrieval). To manage costs, a lightweight quality gate identifies coverage gaps in initial keyword results, adaptively routing only the ~10% of users who benefit from semantic prospecting to the LLM path. Offline evaluation demonstrates that this gated approach captures the bulk of semantic prospecting gains in Relevance Score while maintaining competitive re-targeting performance at a 90% reduction in LLM costs. Finally, in a 2-week online A/B test at Snap, SMART improved the ad conversion rate by +27.6% over a strong embedding-based baseline.

Congfei Zhang, Jingxiao Ma, Xiaodong Liu +14

Snap Inc. Bellevue, WA, USA · Snap Inc. Seattle, WA, USA · Snap Inc. Palo Alto, CA, USA +1

Online Advertising Adaptive Retrieval LLM Routing Hybrid Retrieval Dense Retrieval

Jul 19, 2026cs.LG

AIGB-R1: Self-Evolving Generative Auto-Bidding via Hierarchical Planner-Executor Optimization

Auto-bidding plays an essential role in online advertising, automatically adjusting bids for advertisers to optimize their commercial goals. The emerging AI-Generated Bidding (AIGB) paradigm widely adopts generative modeling to optimize bidding strategies, yet suffers from the limited mode coverage of offline datasets and inadequate task-state understanding, hindering effective exploration of optimal strategies. Large Language Models (LLMs), with prior world knowledge and reasoning capabilities, offer a promising approach to overcome these limitations. However, directly applying LLMs to auto-bidding tasks faces inherent challenges in limited numerical precision, hallucinations, and inference latency. To address these limitations, we propose AIGB-R1, a hierarchical self-evolving auto-bidding framework aiming to enhance AI-Generated Bidding via LLMs' Reasoning capabilities, comprising a high-level Planner module for macro-level strategy planning and a low-level Executor module for fine-grained decision-making. Building upon this, we design an experience-driven self-evolving loop, enabling autonomous strategy exploration and optimization from accumulated experience. We adopt a two-stage pipeline of offline pre-training and post-training alignment, and build an interactive bidding simulation environment for strategy rollout. Furthermore, we propose Decoupled Group Relative Policy Optimization (D-GRPO) to achieve end-to-end optimization via advantage decoupling. Experimental results on a large-scale public dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of AIGB-R1.

Yuejia Dou, Hesong Wang, Xinyu Zhang +6

Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China Beijing, China · Alibaba Group Beijing, China

Automated Bidding Large Language Model-Guided Optimization Online Advertising Self-Improving Agents RL for LLM Agents

Jul 15, 2026cs.LG

Adaptive Ad Load Design for Sponsored Search Markets: Evidence, Theory, and Deployment

Ad-load design is a central supply-side decision in sponsored search: more sponsored slots can raise revenue, but may crowd out organic results and degrade user outcomes. We study this trade-off using a large-scale randomized field experiment on an Android app store, where over five million users are exposed to one through six sponsored slots. Increasing ad load raises revenue by up to 43%, but reduces total search conversions by up to 5% and daily engagement by up to 2.2%. These average effects mask substantial heterogeneity: additional slots generate large revenue gains for high-ad-conversion queries, but little or negative marginal revenue for low-conversion queries. The trade-off also shifts within query as advertiser composition changes, such as brand-advertiser presence. Motivated by these findings, we design and deploy a novel adaptive algorithm -- exploration-augmented Locally Adaptive Ad Load (e-LAAL). e-LAAL combines LAAL, a model-free query-level decision rule that updates ad-load recommendations using recent outcomes, with static exploration arms that maintain support and provide fixed-policy counterfactual benchmarks. We provide a finite-time dynamic-regret guarantee for the e-LAAL architecture. In a platform-level production deployment serving 22.3 million users and 77.6 million searches, e-LAAL improves the empirical revenue--conversion trade-off relative to deployed static benchmarks and outperforms uniform and historical query-dependent static benchmarks.

Mohammad Rashid, Hema Yoganarasimhan

University of Washington

Multi-Armed Bandits Online Advertising

Jul 9, 2026cs.CL

COBART: Controlled, Optimized, Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformer for Ad Headline Generation

Online ads are essential to all businesses and ad headlines are one of their core creative component. Existing methods can generate headlines automatically and also optimize their click-through-rate (CTR) and quality. However, evolving ad formats and changing creative requirements make it difficult to generate optimized & customized headlines. We propose a novel method that uses prefix control tokens along with BART fine-tuning. It yields the highest CTR and also allows users to control the length of generated headlines for use across different ad formats. The method is also flexible and can easily be adapted to other architectures, creative requirements and optimization criteria. Our experiments demonstrate a 25.82% increment in Rouge-L and a 5.82% increment in estimated CTR over previously published strong ad headline generation baseline.

Yashal Shakti Kanungo, Gyanendra Das, Pooja A +1

Amazon United States of America · Amazon India

Transformer Online Advertising Controllable Text Generation Text Generation

Jul 4, 2026cs.IR

Enhancement of E-commerce Sponsored Search Relevancy with LLM

Sponsored search plays a crucial role as a revenue stream for search engines, wherein advertisers competitively bid on keywords that align with the users' search queries. The task of matching relevant keywords to these queries is complicated by the vast and ever-evolving space of keywords, the ambiguity of user and advertiser intentions, and the wide range of topics and languages involved. Consequently, ensuring that ads are pertinent to user queries presents significant challenges. In the fast-paced world of e-commerce, the accuracy of sponsored search results is vital for boosting user satisfaction and optimizing business operations. This paper presents the development of an advanced Ad Relevance Model within a sponsored search framework, utilizing the power of a pretrained large language model. We detail a pioneering adaptation of the LLAMA2 7B model through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), which markedly enhances search precision and operational efficiency, thus opening new avenues for improving user interactions in extensive online marketplaces such as Walmart.com. We introduce a novel query and ad title classifier, which discerns the relevance of search interactions across three categories: Relevant, Partially Relevant, and Irrelevant. Our approach involved adapting the pretrained model specifically for the e-commerce sponsored search context, training it on a large dataset. The fine-tuned model demonstrated a marked improvement in ad relevance accuracy, achieving 89.43% accuracy on a comprehensive test dataset -- outperforming both the baseline model and other advanced language models like GPT-4. The integration of LoRA with the based model represents a significant stride in customizing language models for e-commerce applications, resulting in enhanced search accuracy, cost efficiency, and operational privacy -- a triad essential for the modern digital marketplace.

Md Omar Faruk Rokon, Andrei Simion, Weizhi Du +3

Walmart AdTech, Sunnyvale, CA, USA

LLM Fine-Tuning E-Commerce Search Online Advertising E-Commerce

Jul 4, 2026cs.IR

Next-Gen Sponsored Search: Crafting the Perfect Query with Inventory-Aware RAG (InvAwr-RAG) Based GenAI

Sponsored search plays a crucial role in e-commerce revenue generation, where advertisers strategically bid on keywords to capture the attention of users through relevant search queries. However, the process of identifying pertinent keywords for a given query presents significant challenges because of a vast and evolving keyword landscape, ambiguous intentions, and topic diversity. This paper highlights an opportunity for to earn a considerable amount of Ads revenue and user engagement where a significant proportion of queries fail to retrieve any sponsored ads. To utilize this opportunity, we introduce the Inventory-Aware RAG-based Generative AI model (InvAwr-RAG), which integrates advanced semantic retrieval and real-time inventory data. This model combines dynamically generated and historically successful queries to align with available inventory and ad campaigns while diversifying rewritten queries to enhance relevance and user engagement. Preliminary results show a significant 68% increase in fill rate and balanced relevance metrics, indicating a strong potential for increased ad revenue. The InvAwr-RAG model sets a new standard in dynamic query optimization, significantly improving ad relevancy, advertiser ROI, and user experience on Walmart's digital platform.

Md Omar Faruk Rokon, Weizhi Du, Zhaodong Wang +1

Walmart AdTech, Sunnyvale, CA, USA

Retrieval-Augmented Generation Online Advertising Query Reformulation

Jun 25, 2026cs.LG

BetXplain: An Explanation-Annotated Dataset for Detecting Manipulative Betting Advertisements on Social Media

The promotion of betting applications on social media platforms has increased significantly in recent years. Many of these advertisements use persuasive techniques that may mislead users, encourage risky behavior, and potentially influence users' mental well-being. However, research on the automated detection of manipulative and deceptive betting advertisements remains limited due to the lack of publicly available annotated datasets. In this work, we introduce a new dataset of betting-related advertisements collected from two widely used social media platforms, Instagram and Reddit. The advertisements were manually annotated for manipulative and deceptive advertising practices. In addition to classification labels, the dataset includes human-provided explanations that describe the reasoning behind each annotation, enabling research into explainable approaches to detecting manipulative advertising. Furthermore, we analyze the strategies commonly used in betting advertisements and examine how these persuasive tactics may impact users' mental health. The proposed framework can also enable practical applications such as browser plugins that warn users about manipulative betting advertisements and automated web crawlers that help regulatory authorities monitor and detect such promotions online.

MSVPJ Sathvik, Parmitha Vangapandu, Nishit Rane +3

University of Birmingham, UK · IIIT Dharwad, India · NUS, Singapore +1

Social Media Analysis Online Advertising

Jun 25, 2026cs.IR

Attributed, But Not Incremental: Cannibalization-Corrected Attribution for Large-Scale Advertising

In large-scale paid acquisition and growth advertising systems, production attribution outputs are widely used for daily budget allocation and channel diagnosis. However, paid-attributed conversions such as daily new users (DNU) may systematically overstate true incremental growth when paid channels overlap with organic demand, brand-driven traffic, or other acquisition channels. This attribution-cannibalization mismatch can distort incremental ROI measurement and budget decisions at scale. We propose an experiment-calibrated attribution correction framework that uses incrementality experiments as causal anchors to convert sparse lift measurements into daily correction estimates. To make the corrected signal actionable at production granularity, we further allocate calibrated cannibalization volume across business hierarchies under structural consistency constraints. Offline forward-in-time validation against channel-level incrementality experiment readouts shows that the proposed framework substantially reduces calibration error relative to raw attribution and fine-grained ML baselines. Deployed across multiple global TikTok markets, the system supported budget and traffic strategy adjustments that were followed by an approximately 15-percentage-point reduction in the measured cannibalization rate.

Donghui Li, Bowen Yuan, Zili Yang +2

TikTok · San Jose, CA, USA · Shanghai, China +1

Causal Effect Estimation Online Advertising Fine-Grained Credit Assignment Causal Intervention

Jun 24, 2026cs.IR

AutoRelAnnotator: Calibrated Model Cascades for Cost-Efficient Relevance Evaluation in Sponsored Search

How can we generate high-quality relevance annotations at scale without the cost and delays of human labeling? Relevance annotations are the backbone of search ranking systems which is needed for training data preparation, NDCG evaluation, and root cause analysis. However, human annotation is slow and off-the-shelf LLMs suffer from accuracy on domain-specific tasks. We propose a calibrated model cascade, a systematic approach for cost-efficient offline relevance annotation by routing queries through progressively larger fine-tuned classifiers. Our central insight is that accuracy and cost are orthogonal optimizations: domain-specific fine-tuning drives accuracy, cascading drives cost, and per-class isotonic calibration adds a small but reliable gain on top. Our contribution is threefold: (a) we decompose the gains and show that fine-tuning contributes 20 accuracy points while cascading is approximately accuracy-neutral but halves compute cost, (b) we introduce per-class isotonic calibration as one component of the cascade, contributing a small but statistically significant gain (+0.6 points over the strongest calibration baseline), and (c) we validate the system in production across six offline use cases, processing 150M+ annotations and enabling faster experimentation cycles. Our work is a building block for scalable, high-quality offline annotation pipelines in search and advertising systems.

Md Omar Faruk Rokon, Shasvat Desai, Hong Yao +1

Walmart Global Tech, Sunnyvale, CA, USA

Online Advertising Cost-Aware Inference Information Retrieval

Jun 15, 2026cs.LG

Integrated Marketing Attribution: A Bayesian Framework for Privacy-Safe Granular Measurement Anchored in MMM

Retail marketing measurement increasingly requires granular campaign-level insights without relying on user-level tracking. However, the two dominant approaches, Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), often produce fragmented insights. MMM is privacy-safe and robust for channel-level planning but is too coarse for campaign optimization, while MTA provides granular attribution but has become less reliable under increasing privacy restrictions. We propose Integrated Marketing Attribution (IMA), a unified framework that combines MMM with channel specific Bayesian attribution models to derive campaign-level effects from aggregated data. By leveraging MMM-informed priors, IMA delivers granular, privacy-safe attribution while preserving consistency with MMM.

Meghana R. Bhat, Ankit Umare, Utsav Aggarwal +4

Lowe’s Companies, Inc.

Online Advertising

Jun 14, 2026cs.CL

Interactor: Agentic RL oriented Iterative Creation for Ad Description Generation in Sponsored Search

This paper focuses on automatically generating informative ad descriptions in sponsored search. Unlike ad titles which are usually optimized to attract user click feedbacks, ad descriptions have a longer text span and possess the potential of incorporating world knowledge to address user search intents while presenting the fine-grained selling points of the ads. We propose Interactor, a multi-turn iterative creation framework optimized with agentic RL for ad description generation. The generation model acts as a policy that interacts with a customized environment consisting of multiple generative reward models. Given initial generations by the policy, the customized GenRMs evaluate multi-dimensional qualities including knowledge capacity and landing page consistency, providing both binary signals and reasoning feedbacks. The policy then iteratively refines the descriptions based on such feedbacks to ensure continuous improvement. Experiments on industrial datasets show that the Interactor framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in generating knowledge-rich and faithful ad descriptions. Since May 2026, it has been deployed online in a leading search ads system, contributing to both ad revenue and user experience.

Penghui Wei, Jiayu Wu, Chao Ye +3

Search Ads, Baidu Inc.

Online Advertising RL for Generative Models Text Generation

Jun 13, 2026cs.AI

Attribute Inference from Interactive Targeted Ads

Targeted advertising systems can pair audiences selected by advertisers with ad units that expose visible user actions. When an interaction remains linked to the campaign that elicited it, the advertiser may receive an observation tied to a user rather than only an aggregate report. We model that channel as a noisy oracle for attribute inference. The model separates targeting predicates, exposure, interaction, and disclosure. These boundaries capture the gap between eligibility and delivery, and the gap between interaction and advertiser visibility. We build a reproducible benchmark using synthetic populations calibrated with public data, each with known sensitive labels. A generated campaign semantics layer provides topic variants and response priors. The simulator generates the ground truth, event traces, disclosed observations, and metrics. The evaluation compares Bayesian, supervised, positive and unlabeled, and adaptive attacks under common campaign and disclosure definitions. The final evaluation uses four topic variants, seven simulator seeds, and two interaction settings. Repeated campaigns with identity exposure produce measurable but bounded inference signal. At

160

campaigns, Bayesian and supervised attacks reach about

0.64

AUC in the main setting and about

0.65

AUC in the higher interaction setting. Disclosure policy is the strongest control. Aggregate reporting removes the evaluated oracle input tied to users. Type filtering and randomized disclosure reduce the released signal. The result is a model, artifact, and defense evaluation method for privacy in interactive targeted advertising. The code is available at https://github.com/P-HOW/Interactive-Ad-Oracle.

Peihao Li

Privacy Auditing Adversarial Attacks Online Advertising

Jun 8, 2026stat.ML

Decision-Calibrated Conformal Uncertainty for Pacing Decisions in Streaming Advertising

We develop a decision-calibrated conformal framework for pacing decisions in streaming advertising. Pacing depends on uncertain future inventory, demand pressure, incremental response, and member-experience load. Instead of calibrating a generic forecast residual, the framework measures forecast error by its largest impact on the policies that could actually be deployed. The main theorem shows that the proposed score is the smallest valid uncertainty measure that uniformly protects all deployable pacing policies. Geometrically, it is the support function of the signed policy sensitivity set. Split conformal calibration gives finite-sample coverage for this score. A high-dimensional separation theorem shows that traditional residual calibration can be arbitrarily more conservative by paying for nuisance inventory dimensions, and a robust pacing result combines inventory, response, and experience uncertainty. On public-data-calibrated pacing replays built from Criteo Uplift and KuaiRand datasets, traditional conformal pacing remains unresolved with high residual radii of 7236.7 on Criteo and 4629.4 on KuaiRand. With the proposed decision calibration approach, the uncertainty radii are reduced to 18.4 and 278.6 respectively, with separate margins for value, delivery, budget, and member load. On Criteo, the proposed method certifies a less aggressive pacing policy than the point-forecast baseline, and reduces held-out any-violation rate from 16.7% to 3.3%, with zero budget and member-load violations. On KuaiRand, the choice remains unresolved. In a nutshell, the paper establishes that forecasts, response estimates, and member-experience models should be judged by whether they shrink the uncertainty that the pacing decision uses, as this leads to confident decisions that are not overly conservative.

Prashant Shekhar, Caroline Howard

Department of Mathematics Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Daytona Beach, FL, USA

Sequential Decision Making Online Advertising Conformal Prediction Decision-Making under Uncertainty

Jun 4, 2026cs.GT

HMAF: A Hierarchical Multi-Slot GD-RTB Allocation Framework

In modern online advertising platforms, Guaranteed Delivery (GD) contracts coexist and bid with Real-Time Bidding (RTB) auctions. Recent approaches either decouple GD and RTB optimization or rely on heuristic priority rules, and thus fail to effectively balance short-term revenue maximization with long-term contract delivery under complex multi-slot delivery and impression constraints. To address these challenges, we propose HMAF (Hierarchical Multi-Slot Allocation Framework), a unified framework designed to optimize impression allocation in GD--RTB advertising platforms. HMAF employs the Plan--Calibrate--Execute paradigm as its core structure, and integrates offline constraint optimization with online decision-making, balancing offline GD resource planning, dynamically calibrating GD--RTB competitiveness, and making real-time listwise rank decisions across multi-slot environments. HMAF has been implemented in multiple marketing scenarios at Meituan, one of the world's largest online food delivery platforms, leading to a 3.72% increase in GD delivery rate and a 1.59% increase in total advertisement revenue.

Tianxing Bu, Zhaoqi Zhang, Linyou Cai +7

Meituan Beijing, China · Nanyang Technological University Singapore · China Agricultural University Beijing, China

Online Advertising Online Resource Allocation Real-Time Bidding