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arXiv · 2501.05591

Session-Level Dynamic Ad Load Optimization using Offline Robust Reinforcement Learning

Tao Liu·Qi Xu·Wei Shi·Zhigang Hua·Shuang Yang
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Abstract

Session-level dynamic ad load optimization aims to personalize the density and types of delivered advertisements in real time during a user's online session by dynamically balancing user experience quality and ad monetization. Traditional causal learning-based approaches struggle with key technical challenges, especially in handling confounding bias and distribution shifts. In this paper, we develop an offline deep Q-network (DQN)-based framework that effectively mitigates confounding bias in dynamic systems and demonstrates more than 80% offline gains compared to the best causal learning-based production baseline. Moreover, to improve the framework's robustness against unanticipated distribution shifts, we further enhance our framework with a novel offline robust dueling DQN approach. This approach achieves more stable rewards on multiple OpenAI-Gym datasets as perturbations increase, and provides an additional 5% offline gains on real-world ad delivery data. Deployed across multiple production systems, our approach has achieved outsized topline gains. Post-launch online A/B tests have shown double-digit improvements in the engagement-ad score trade-off efficiency, significantly enhancing our platform's capability to serve both consumers and advertisers.

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Tao Liu, Qi Xu, Wei Shi, Zhigang Hua, Shuang Yang. 2025-01-09. Session-Level Dynamic Ad Load Optimization using Offline Robust Reinforcement Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05591

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