Hierarchically Constrained Adaptive Ad Exposure in Feeds

TL;DR

This paper introduces HCA2E, a hierarchical adaptive ad exposure method optimizing long-term feed performance while maintaining game-theoretical properties, computational efficiency, and robustness, demonstrated through extensive experiments and deployment.

Contribution

It formulates adaptive ad exposure as a Dynamic Knapsack Problem and proposes HCA2E, a novel approach that addresses limitations of previous methods in scalability, long-term optimization, and auction properties.

Findings

HCA2E outperforms baseline methods in offline and online tests.

HCA2E is computationally efficient and scalable for large applications.

HCA2E has been successfully deployed to serve millions of users.

Abstract

A contemporary feed application usually provides blended results of organic items and sponsored items~(ads) to users. Conventionally, ads are exposed at fixed positions. Such a static exposure strategy is inefficient due to ignoring users' personalized preferences towards ads. To this end, adaptive ad exposure has become an appealing strategy to boost the overall performance of the feed. However, existing approaches to implementing the adaptive ad exposure still suffer from several limitations: 1) they usually fall into sub-optimal solutions because of only focusing on request-level optimization without consideration of the long-term application-level performance and constraints, 2) they neglect the necessity of keeping the game-theoretical properties of ad auctions, which may lead to anarchy in bidding, and 3) they can hardly be deployed in large-scale applications due to high computational complexity. In this paper, we focus on long-term performance optimization under hierarchical constraints in feeds and formulate the adaptive ad exposure as a Dynamic Knapsack Problem. We propose an effective approach: Hierarchically Constrained Adaptive Ad Exposure~(HCA2E). We present that HCA2E possesses desired game-theoretical properties, computational efficiency, and performance robustness. Comprehensive offline and online experiments on a leading e-commerce application demonstrate the significant performance superiority of HCA2E over representative baselines. HCA2E has also been deployed on this application to serve millions of daily users.