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arXiv · 2204.11589

Hybrid Transfer in Deep Reinforcement Learning for Ads Allocation

Ze Wang·Guogang Liao·Xiaowen Shi·Xiaoxu Wu·Chuheng Zhang·Bingqi Zhu·Yongkang Wang·Xingxing Wang·Dong Wang
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Abstract

Ads allocation, which involves allocating ads and organic items to limited slots in feed with the purpose of maximizing platform revenue, has become a research hotspot. Notice that, e-commerce platforms usually have multiple entrances for different categories and some entrances have few visits. Data from these entrances has low coverage, which makes it difficult for the agent to learn. To address this challenge, we propose Similarity-based Hybrid Transfer for Ads Allocation (SHTAA), which effectively transfers samples as well as knowledge from data-rich entrance to data-poor entrance. Specifically, we define an uncertainty-aware similarity for MDP to estimate the similarity of MDP for different entrances. Based on this similarity, we design a hybrid transfer method, including instance transfer and strategy transfer, to efficiently transfer samples and knowledge from one entrance to another. Both offline and online experiments on Meituan food delivery platform demonstrate that the proposed method could achieve better performance for data-poor entrance and increase the revenue for the platform.

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Ze Wang, Guogang Liao, Xiaowen Shi, Xiaoxu Wu, Chuheng Zhang, Bingqi Zhu, Yongkang Wang, Xingxing Wang, Dong Wang. 2022-04-02. Hybrid Transfer in Deep Reinforcement Learning for Ads Allocation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11589

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