Modern online advertising systems inevitably rely on personalization methods, such as click-through rate (CTR) prediction. Recent progress in CTR prediction enjoys the rich representation capabilities of deep learning and achieves great success in large-scale industrial applications. However, these methods can suffer from lack of exploration. Another line of prior work addresses the exploration-exploitation trade-off problem with contextual bandit methods, which are recently less studied in the industry due to the difficulty in extending their flexibility with deep models. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Uncertainty-Aware Learning (DUAL) method to learn CTR models based on Gaussian processes, which can provide predictive uncertainty estimations while maintaining the flexibility of deep neural networks. DUAL can be easily implemented on existing models and deployed in real-time systems with minimal extra computational overhead. By linking the predictive uncertainty estimation ability of DUAL to well-known bandit algorithms, we further present DUAL-based Ad-ranking strategies to boost up long-term utilities such as the social welfare in advertising systems. Experimental results on several public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. Remarkably, an online A/B test deployed in the Alibaba display advertising platform shows an 8.2% social welfare improvement and an 8.0% revenue lift.
Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；Bytedance（字节跳动）
With the recent prevalence of Reinforcement Learning (RL), there have been tremendous interests in utilizing RL for online advertising in recommendation platforms (e.g., e-commerce and news feed sites). However, most RL-based advertising algorithms focus on optimizing ads' revenue while ignoring the possible negative influence of ads on user experience of recommended items (products, articles and videos). Developing an optimal advertising algorithm in recommendations faces immense challenges because interpolating ads improperly or too frequently may decrease user experience, while interpolatin…
Search, recommendation, and online advertising are the three most important information-providing mechanisms on the web. These information seeking techniques, satisfying users' information needs by suggesting users personalized objects (information or services) at the appropriate time and place, play a crucial role in mitigating the information overload problem. With recent great advances in deep reinforcement learning (DRL), there have been increasing interests in developing DRL based information seeking techniques. These DRL based techniques have two key advantages -- (1) they are able to co…
Multi-task Offline Reinforcement Learning for Online Advertising in Recommender Systems
Taobao \& Tmall Group of Alibaba City University of Hong Kong Hangzhou China；Southern University of Science；Technology, City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong China；City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong China；University of Queensland Brisbane Australia；Taobao \& Tmall Group of Alibaba Beijing China；Taobao \& Tmall Group of Alibaba City University of Hong Kong；Technology, City University of Hong Kong；City University of Hong Kong；University of Queensland；Taobao \& Tmall Group of Alibaba
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
Online behavioral advertising, and the associated tracking paraphernalia, poses a real privacy threat. Unfortunately, existing privacy-enhancing tools are not always effective against online advertising and tracking. We propose Harpo, a principled learning-based approach to subvert online behavioral advertising through obfuscation. Harpo uses reinforcement learning to adaptively interleave real page visits with fake pages to distort a tracker's view of a user's browsing profile. We evaluate Harpo against real-world user profiling and ad targeting models used for online behavioral advertising. …
Firms implementing digital advertising campaigns face a complex problem in determining the right match between their advertising creatives and target audiences. Typical solutions to the problem have leveraged non-experimental methods, or used "split-testing" strategies that have not explicitly addressed the complexities induced by targeted audiences that can potentially overlap with one another. This paper presents an adaptive algorithm that addresses the problem via online experimentation. The algorithm is set up as a contextual bandit and addresses the overlap issue by partitioning the targe…
Comparison Lift is an experimentation-as-a-service (EaaS) application for testing online advertising audiences and creatives at JD.com. Unlike many other EaaS tools that focus primarily on fixed sample A/B testing, Comparison Lift deploys a custom bandit-based experimentation algorithm. The advantages of the bandit-based approach are two-fold. First, it aligns the randomization induced in the test with the advertiser's goals from testing. Second, by adapting experimental design to information acquired during the test, it reduces substantially the cost of experimentation to the advertiser. Sinc…
Criteo AI Labs（科韬人工智能实验室）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Telefonica Research（西班牙电信研究院）
Recommender Systems are becoming ubiquitous in many settings and take many forms, from product recommendation in e-commerce stores, to query suggestions in search engines, to friend recommendation in social networks. Current research directions which are largely based upon supervised learning from historical data appear to be showing diminishing returns with a lot of practitioners report a discrepancy between improvements in offline metrics for supervised learning and the online performance of the newly proposed models. One possible reason is that we are using the wrong paradigm: when looking …
In online display advertising, guaranteed contracts and real-time bidding (RTB) are two major ways to sell impressions for a publisher. Despite the increasing popularity of RTB, there is still half of online display advertising revenue generated from guaranteed contracts. Therefore, simultaneously selling impressions through both guaranteed contracts and RTB is a straightforward choice for a publisher to maximize its yield. However, deriving the optimal strategy to allocate impressions is not a trivial task, especially when the environment is unstable in real-world applications. In this paper,…
Over the last two decades, we have seen extensive industrial research in the area of computational advertising. In this paper, our goal is to study the performance of various online learning algorithms to identify and display the best ads/offers with the highest conversion rates to web users. We formulate our ad-selection problem as a Multi-Armed Bandit problem which is a classical paradigm in Machine Learning. We have been applying machine learning, data mining, probability, and statistics to analyze big data in the ad-tech space and devise efficient ad selection strategies. This article high…
Facebook Core Data Science（Facebook核心数据科学部门）；Sapienza University of Rome（罗马大学）；Facebook AI Applied Research（Facebook人工智能应用研究部门）
We study the problem of an online advertising system that wants to optimally spend an advertiser's 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 b…
An Adaptable Budget Planner for Enhancing Budget-Constrained Auto-Bidding in Online Advertising
School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院）；Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies, Peking University（北京大学计算科学前沿中心）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
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, whi…
University Paris-Saclay（巴黎-萨克雷大学）；UVSQ（凡尔赛大学）；Criteo（科睿拓）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）
In this paper, the method UCB-RS, which resorts to recommendation system (RS) for enhancing the upper-confidence bound algorithm UCB, is presented. The proposed method is used for dealing with non-stationary and large-state spaces multi-armed bandit problems. The proposed method has been targeted to the problem of the product recommendation in the online advertising. Through extensive testing with RecoGym, an OpenAI Gym-based reinforcement learning environment for the product recommendation in online advertising, the proposed method outperforms the widespread reinforcement learning schemes suc…
Prospective display advertising poses a great challenge for large advertising platforms as the strongest predictive signals of users are not eligible to be used in the conversion prediction systems. To that end efforts are made to collect as much information as possible about each user from various data sources and to design powerful models that can capture weaker signals ultimately obtaining good quality of conversion prediction probability estimates. In this study we propose a novel time-aware approach to model heterogeneous sequences of users' activities and capture implicit signals of user…
We describe the 1st place winning approach for the CIKM Cup 2016 Challenge. In this paper, we provide an approach to reasonably identify same users across multiple devices based on browsing logs. Our approach regards a candidate ranking problem as pairwise classification and utilizes an unsupervised neural feature ensemble approach to learn latent features of users. Combined with traditional hand crafted features, each user pair feature is fed into a supervised classifier in order to perform pairwise classification. Lastly, we propose supervised and unsupervised inference techniques.
In online advertising, a set of potential advertisements can be ranked by a certain auction system where usually the top-1 advertisement would be selected and displayed at an advertising space. In this paper, we show a selection bias issue that is present in an auction system. We analyze that the selection bias destroy truthfulness of the auction, which implies that the buyers (advertisers) on the auction can not maximize their profits. Although selection bias is well known in the field of statistics and there are lot of studies for it, our main contribution is to combine the theoretical analy…
Matching module plays a critical role in display advertising systems. Without query from user, it is challenging for system to match user traffic and ads suitably. System packs up a group of users with common properties such as the same gender or similar shopping interests into a crowd. Here term crowd can be viewed as a tag over users. Then advertisers bid for different crowds and deliver their ads to those targeted users. Matching module in most industrial display advertising systems follows a two-stage paradigm. When receiving a user request, matching system (i) finds the crowds that the us…
A Profit-Maximizing Strategy for Advertising on the e-Commerce Platforms
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Guangdong University of Foreign Studies（广东外语外贸大学）；ShenZhen TingZhu Health Management Co.,Ltd.（深圳市汀竹健康管理有限公司）
Multiple content providers rely on native advertisement for revenue by placing ads within the organic content of their pages. We refer to this setting as ``queryless'' to differentiate from search advertisement where a user submits a search query and gets back related ads. Understanding user intent is critical because relevant ads improve user experience and increase the likelihood of delivering clicks that have value to our advertisers. This paper presents Multi-Channel Sequential Behavior Network (MC-SBN), a deep learning approach for embedding users and ads in a semantic space in which rele…
Internet advertising is a fast growing business which has proved to be significantly important in digital economics. It is vitally important for both web search engines and online content providers and publishers because web advertising provides them with major sources of revenue. Its presence is increasingly important for the whole media industry due to the influence of the Web. For advertisers, it is a smarter alternative to traditional marketing media such as TVs and newspapers. As the web evolves and data collection continues, the design of methods for more targeted, interactive, and frien…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Predicting the probability that a user will click on a specific advertisement has been a prevalent issue in online advertising, attracting much research attention in the past decades. As a hot research frontier driven by industrial needs, recent years have witnessed more and more novel learning models employed to improve advertising CTR prediction. Although extant research provides necessary details on algorithmic design for addressing a variety of specific problems in advertising CTR prediction, the methodological evolution and connections between modeling frameworks are precluded. However, t…
DataPop Inc.（DataPop公司）；University of California Irvine（加利福尼亚大学欧文分校）
We present the concept of Semantic Advertising which we see as the future of online advertising. Semantic Advertising is online advertising powered by semantic technology which essentially enables us to represent and reason with concepts and the meaning of things. This paper aims to 1) Define semantic advertising, 2) Place it in the context of broader and more widely used concepts such as the Semantic Web and Semantic Search, 3) Provide a survey of work in related areas such as context matching, and 4) Provide a perspective on successful emerging technologies and areas of future work. We base …
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；MediaGamma Limited（MediaGamma有限公司）
User behaviour targeting is essential in online advertising. Compared with sponsored search keyword targeting and contextual advertising page content targeting, user behaviour targeting builds users' interest profiles via tracking their online behaviour and then delivers the relevant ads according to each user's interest, which leads to higher targeting accuracy and thus more improved advertising performance. The current user profiling methods include building keywords and topic tags or mapping users onto a hierarchical taxonomy. However, to our knowledge, there is no previous work that explic…
Ad creatives are one of the prominent mediums for online e-commerce advertisements. Ad creatives with enjoyable visual appearance may increase the click-through rate (CTR) of products. Ad creatives are typically handcrafted by advertisers and then delivered to the advertising platforms for advertisement. In recent years, advertising platforms are capable of instantly compositing ad creatives with arbitrarily designated elements of each ingredient, so advertisers are only required to provide basic materials. While facilitating the advertisers, a great number of potential ad creatives can be com…
Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction is a crucial component in the online advertising industry. In order to produce a personalized CTR prediction, an industry-level CTR prediction model commonly takes a high-dimensional (e.g., 100 or 1000 billions of features) sparse vector (that is encoded from query keywords, user portraits, etc.) as input. As a result, the model requires Terabyte scale parameters to embed the high-dimensional input. Hierarchical distributed GPU parameter server has been proposed to enable GPU with limited memory to train the massive network by leveraging CPU main memory and …
This paper focuses on automatically generating the text of an ad, and the goal is that the generated text can capture user interest for achieving higher click-through rate (CTR). We propose CREATER, a CTR-driven advertising text generation approach, to generate ad texts based on high-quality user reviews. To incorporate CTR objective, our model learns from online A/B test data with contrastive learning, which encourages the model to generate ad texts that obtain higher CTR. To alleviate the low-resource issue, we design a customized self-supervised objective reducing the gap between pre-traini…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
In online advertising, the Internet users may be exposed to a sequence of different ad campaigns, i.e., display ads, search, or referrals from multiple channels, before led up to any final sales conversion and transaction. For both campaigners and publishers, it is fundamentally critical to estimate the contribution from ad campaign touch-points during the customer journey (conversion funnel) and assign the right credit to the right ad exposure accordingly. However, the existing research on the multi-touch attribution problem lacks a principled way of utilizing the users' pre-conversion action…
Unversity of Southern California（南加州大学）；eBay Inc.（eBay公司）；Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）
In online advertising, users may be exposed to a range of different advertising campaigns, such as natural search or referral or organic search, before leading to a final transaction. Estimating the contribution of advertising campaigns on the user's journey is very meaningful and crucial. A marketer could observe each customer's interaction with different marketing channels and modify their investment strategies accordingly. Existing methods including both traditional last-clicking methods and recent data-driven approaches for the multi-touch attribution (MTA) problem lack enough interpretati…
In the domain of online advertising, our aim is to serve the best ad to a user who visits a certain webpage, to maximize the chance of a desired action to be performed by this user after seeing the ad. While it is possible to generate a different prediction model for each user to tell if he/she will act on a given ad, the prediction result typically will be quite unreliable with huge variance, since the desired actions are extremely sparse, and the set of users is huge (hundreds of millions) and extremely volatile, i.e., a lot of new users are introduced everyday, or are no longer valid. In th…
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…
Athens University of Economics and Business（雅典经济与商业大学）；Ecole Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）
Creating and monitoring competitive and cost-effective pay-per-click advertisement campaigns through the web-search channel is a resource demanding task in terms of expertise and effort. Assisting or even automating the work of an advertising specialist will have an unrivaled commercial value. In this paper we propose a methodology, an architecture, and a fully functional framework for semi- and fully- automated creation, monitoring, and optimization of cost-efficient pay-per-click campaigns with budget constraints. The campaign creation module generates automatically keywords based on the con…
