English

VAO: Validation-Aligned Optimization for Cross-Task Generative Auto-Bidding

Machine Learning 2026-02-10 v3 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Generative auto-bidding has demonstrated strong performance in online advertising, yet it often suffers from data scarcity in small-scale settings with limited advertiser participation. While cross-task data sharing is a natural remedy to mitigate this issue, naive approaches often introduce gradient bias due to distribution shifts across different tasks, and existing methods are not readily applicable to generative auto-bidding. In this paper, we propose Validation-Aligned Optimization (VAO), a principled data-sharing method that adaptively reweights cross-task data contributions based on validation performance feedback. Notably, VAO aligns training dynamics to prioritize updates that improve generalization on the target task, effectively leveraging auxiliary data and mitigating gradient bias. Building on VAO, we introduce a unified generative autobidding framework that generalizes across multiple tasks using a single model and all available task data. Extensive experiments on standard auto-bidding benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.07760,
  title  = {VAO: Validation-Aligned Optimization for Cross-Task Generative Auto-Bidding},
  author = {Yiqin Lv and Zhiyu Mou and Miao Xu and Jinghao Chen and Qi Wang and Yixiu Mao and Yun Qu and Rongquan Bai and Chuan Yu and Jian Xu and Bo Zheng and Xiangyang Ji},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.07760},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:25:42.955Z