Enhancing Generative Auto-bidding with Offline Reward Evaluation and Policy Search

Zhiyu Mou, Yiqin Lv, Miao Xu, Cheems Wang, Yixiu Mao, Jinghao Chen, Qichen Ye, Chao Li, Rongquan Bai, Chuan Yu, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng

Keywords: auto-bidding, offline reinforcement learning, generative decision making

Abstract: Auto-bidding is a critical tool for advertisers to improve advertising performance. Recent progress has demonstrated that AI-Generated Bidding (AIGB), which learns a conditional generative planner from offline data, achieves superior performance compared to typical offline reinforcement learning (RL)-based auto-bidding methods. However, existing AIGB methods still face a performance bottleneck due to their inherent inability to explore beyond the static dataset with feedback. To address this, we propose AIGB-Pearl (Planning with EvaluAtor via RL), a novel method that integrates generative planning and policy optimization. The core of AIGB-Pearl lies in constructing a trajectory evaluator to assess the quality of generated scores and designing a provably sound KL-Lipschitz-constrained score-maximization scheme to ensure safe and efficient exploration beyond the offline dataset. A practical algorithm that incorporates the synchronous coupling technique is further developed to ensure the model regularity required by the proposed scheme. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world advertising systems demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our approach.

Primary Area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning

Submission Number: 24514