HiBid: A Cross-Channel Constrained Bidding System With Budget Allocation by Hierarchical Offline Deep Reinforcement Learning

• Published in: IEEE transactions on computers Vol. 73; no. 3; pp. 815 - 828
• Main Authors: Wang, Hao, Tang, Bo, Liu, Chi Harold, Mao, Shangqin, Zhou, Jiahong, Dai, Zipeng, Sun, Yaqi, Xie, Qianlong, Wang, Xingxing, Wang, Dong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.03.2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Advertising; Budgets; Constraints; Costs; cross-channel bidding; Data augmentation; Deep learning; deep reinforcement learning; Real-time bidding systems; Real-time systems; Reinforcement learning; Resource management; Strategy; Training
• ISSN: 0018-9340; 1557-9956
• DOI: 10.1109/TC.2023.3343111

Online display advertising platforms service numerous advertisers by providing real-time bidding (RTB) for the scale of billions of ad requests every day. The bidding strategy handles ad requests cross multiple channels to maximize the number of clicks under the set financial constraints, i.e., total budget and cost-per-click (CPC), etc. Different from existing works mainly focusing on single channel bidding, we explicitly consider cross-channel constrained bidding with budget allocation. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical offline deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework called "HiBid", consisted of a high-level planner equipped with auxiliary loss for non-competitive budget allocation, and a data augmentation enhanced low-level executor for adaptive bidding strategy in response to allocated budgets. Additionally, a CPC-guided action selection mechanism is introduced to satisfy the cross-channel CPC constraint. Through extensive experiments on both the large-scale log data and online A/B testing, we confirm that HiBid outperforms six baselines in terms of the number of clicks, CPC satisfactory ratio, and return-on-investment (ROI). We also deploy HiBid on Meituan advertising platform to already service tens of thousands of advertisers every day.