Related papers: Breaking Determinism: Stochastic Modeling for Reli…
We present a deterministic exploration mechanism for sponsored search auctions, which enables the auctioneer to learn the relevance scores of advertisers, and allows advertisers to estimate the true value of clicks generated at the auction…
In programmatic advertising, ad slots are usually sold using second-price (SP) auctions in real-time. The highest bidding advertiser wins but pays only the second-highest bid (known as the winning price). In SP, for a single item, the…
Efficient large-scale network allocation requires data-driven pricing mechanisms that internalize the stochastic and non-linear dynamics of user behavior. We move beyond the classic fully strategic agents to study oblivious users (agents…
Optimizing survival outcomes, such as patient survival or customer retention, is a critical objective in data-driven decision-making. Off-Policy Evaluation~(OPE) provides a powerful framework for assessing such decision-making policies…
We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE), which evaluates the performance of a new policy from observed data collected from previous experiments, without requiring the execution of the new policy. This finds important applications in areas…
In cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) advertising campaigns, advertisers always run the risk of spending the budget without getting enough conversions. Moreover, the bidding on advertising inventory has few connections with…
Online retailers often use third-party demand-side-platforms (DSPs) to conduct offsite advertising and reach shoppers across the Internet on behalf of their advertisers. The process involves the retailer participating in instant auctions…
Recent advances in machine learning have spurred significant interest in learning-augmented algorithms, particularly for online optimization. A growing body of work has studied online bidding in this framework, aiming to characterize the…
Offline reinforcement learning enables agents to leverage large pre-collected datasets of environment transitions to learn control policies, circumventing the need for potentially expensive or unsafe online data collection. Significant…
We study distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE), of which the goal is to learn the distribution of the return for a target policy using offline data generated by a different policy. The theoretical foundation of many existing work…
The standard framework of online bidding algorithm design assumes that the seller commits himself to faithfully implementing the rules of the adopted auction. However, the seller may attempt to cheat in execution to increase his revenue if…
In recommender systems (RecSys) and real-time bidding (RTB) for online advertisements, we often try to optimize sequential decision making using bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. In these applications, offline reinforcement…
Predicting click and conversion probabilities when bidding on ad exchanges is at the core of the programmatic advertising industry. Two separated lines of previous works respectively address i) the prediction of user conversion probability…
In display advertising, a small group of sellers and bidders face each other in up to 10 12 auctions a day. In this context, revenue maximisation via monopoly price learning is a high-value problem for sellers. By nature, these auctions are…
Automated bidding, an emerging intelligent decision making paradigm powered by machine learning, has become popular in online advertising. Advertisers in automated bidding evaluate the cumulative utilities and have private financial…
A/B testing is ubiquitous within the machine learning and data science operations of internet companies. Generically, the idea is to perform a statistical test of the hypothesis that a new feature is better than the existing platform---for…
In this work, we consider the problem of estimating a behaviour policy for use in Off-Policy Policy Evaluation (OPE) when the true behaviour policy is unknown. Via a series of empirical studies, we demonstrate how accurate OPE is strongly…
Online advertising has become one of the most successful business models of the internet era. Impression opportunities are typically allocated through real-time auctions, where advertisers bid to secure advertisement slots. Deciding the…
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) for episodic Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) with continuous states. Motivated by the recently proposed proximal causal inference framework, we develop a…
We design online algorithms for the fair allocation of public goods to a set of $N$ agents over a sequence of $T$ rounds and focus on improving their performance using predictions. In the basic model, a public good arrives in each round,…