No Arabic abstract
The real-time bidding (RTB), aka programmatic buying, has recently become the fastest growing area in online advertising. Instead of bulking buying and inventory-centric buying, RTB mimics stock exchanges and utilises computer algorithms to automatically buy and sell ads in real-time; It uses per impression context and targets the ads to specific people based on data about them, and hence dramatically increases the effectiveness of display advertising. In this paper, we provide an empirical analysis and measurement of a production ad exchange. Using the data sampled from both demand and supply side, we aim to provide first-hand insights into the emerging new impression selling infrastructure and its bidding behaviours, and help identifying research and design issues in such systems. From our study, we observed that periodic patterns occur in various statistics including impressions, clicks, bids, and conversion rates (both post-view and post-click), which suggest time-dependent models would be appropriate for capturing the repeated patterns in RTB. We also found that despite the claimed second price auction, the first price payment in fact is accounted for 55.4% of total cost due to the arrangement of the soft floor price. As such, we argue that the setting of soft floor price in the current RTB systems puts advertisers in a less favourable position. Furthermore, our analysis on the conversation rates shows that the current bidding strategy is far less optimal, indicating the significant needs for optimisation algorithms incorporating the facts such as the temporal behaviours, the frequency and recency of the ad displays, which have not been well considered in the past.
Real-time bidding (RTB) based display advertising has become one of the key technological advances in computational advertising. RTB enables advertisers to buy individual ad impressions via an auction in real-time and facilitates the evaluation and the bidding of individual impressions across multiple advertisers. In RTB, the advertisers face three main challenges when optimizing their bidding strategies, namely (i) estimating the utility (e.g.,
The emergence of real-time auction in online advertising has drawn huge attention of modeling the market competition, i.e., bid landscape forecasting. The problem is formulated as to forecast the probability distribution of market price for each ad auction. With the consideration of the censorship issue which is caused by the second-price auction mechanism, many researchers have devoted their efforts on bid landscape forecasting by incorporating survival analysis from medical research field. However, most existing solutions mainly focus on either counting-based statistics of the segmented sample clusters, or learning a parameterized model based on some heuristic assumptions of distribution forms. Moreover, they neither consider the sequential patterns of the feature over the price space. In order to capture more sophisticated yet flexible patterns at fine-grained level of the data, we propose a Deep Landscape Forecasting (DLF) model which combines deep learning for probability distribution forecasting and survival analysis for censorship handling. Specifically, we utilize a recurrent neural network to flexibly model the conditional winning probability w.r.t. each bid price. Then we conduct the bid landscape forecasting through probability chain rule with strict mathematical derivations. And, in an end-to-end manner, we optimize the model by minimizing two negative likelihood losses with comprehensive motivations. Without any specific assumption for the distribution form of bid landscape, our model shows great advantages over previous works on fitting various sophisticated market price distributions. In the experiments over two large-scale real-world datasets, our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions under various metrics.
In online advertising, auto-bidding has become an essential tool for advertisers to optimize their preferred ad performance metrics by simply expressing the high-level campaign objectives and constraints. Previous works consider the design of auto-bidding agents from the single-agent view without modeling the mutual influence between agents. In this paper, we instead consider this problem from the perspective of a distributed multi-agent system, and propose a general Multi-Agent reinforcement learning framework for Auto-Bidding, namely MAAB, to learn the auto-bidding strategies. First, we investigate the competition and cooperation relation among auto-bidding agents, and propose temperature-regularized credit assignment for establishing a mixed cooperative-competitive paradigm. By carefully making a competition and cooperation trade-off among the agents, we can reach an equilibrium state that guarantees not only individual advertisers utility but also the system performance (social welfare). Second, due to the observed 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 to alleviate the degradation of revenue. Third, to deploy MAAB to 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 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 guarantees the ad platforms revenue.
We present LADDER, the first deep reinforcement learning agent that can successfully learn control policies for large-scale real-world problems directly from raw inputs composed of high-level semantic information. The agent is based on an asynchronous stochastic variant of DQN (Deep Q Network) named DASQN. The inputs of the agent are plain-text descriptions of states of a game of incomplete information, i.e. real-time large scale online auctions, and the rewards are auction profits of very large scale. We apply the agent to an essential portion of JDs online RTB (real-time bidding) advertising business and find that it easily beats the former state-of-the-art bidding policy that had been carefully engineered and calibrated by human experts: during JD.coms June 18th anniversary sale, the agent increased the companys ads revenue from the portion by more than 50%, while the advertisers ROI (return on investment) also improved significantly.
We study the problem of an online advertising system that wants to optimally spend an advertisers given budget for a campaign across multiple platforms, without knowing the value for showing an ad to the users on those platforms. We model this challenging practical application as a Stochastic Bandits with Knapsacks problem over $T$ rounds of bidding with the set of arms given by the set of distinct bidding $m$-tuples, where $m$ is the number of platforms. We modify the algorithm proposed in Badanidiyuru emph{et al.,} to extend it to the case of multiple platforms to obtain an algorithm for both the discrete and continuous bid-spaces. Namely, for discrete bid spaces we give an algorithm with regret $Oleft(OPT sqrt {frac{mn}{B} }+ sqrt{mn OPT}right)$, where $OPT$ is the performance of the optimal algorithm that knows the distributions. For continuous bid spaces the regret of our algorithm is $tilde{O}left(m^{1/3} cdot minleft{ B^{2/3}, (m T)^{2/3} right} right)$. When restricted to this special-case, this bound improves over Sankararaman and Slivkins in the regime $OPT ll T$, as is the case in the particular application at hand. Second, we show an $ Omegaleft (sqrt {m OPT} right)$ lower bound for the discrete case and an $Omegaleft( m^{1/3} B^{2/3}right)$ lower bound for the continuous setting, almost matching the upper bounds. Finally, we use a real-world data set from a large internet online advertising company with multiple ad platforms and show that our algorithms outperform common benchmarks and satisfy the required properties warranted in the real-world application.