Enhancing Generative Auto-bidding with Offline Reward Evaluation and Policy Search

ICLR 2026 Conference SubmissionAnonymous Authors
auto-biddingoffline reinforcement learninggenerative decision making
Abstract:

Auto-bidding serves as a critical tool for advertisers to improve their advertising performance. Recent progress has demonstrated that AI-Generated Bidding (AIGB), which learns a conditional generative planner from offline data, achieves superior performance compared to typical offline reinforcement learning (RL)-based auto-bidding methods. However, existing AIGB methods still face a performance bottleneck due to their inherent inability to explore beyond the static offline dataset. To address this, we propose AIGB-Pearl (Planning with EvaluAtor via RL), a novel method that integrates generative planning and policy optimization. The core of AIGB-Pearl lies in constructing a trajectory evaluator for scoring generation quality and designing a provably sound KL-Lipschitz-constrained score maximization scheme to ensure safe and efficient generalization beyond the offline dataset. A practical algorithm incorporating the synchronous coupling technique is further devised to ensure the model regularity required by the proposed scheme. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world advertising systems demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our approach.

Disclaimer
This report is AI-GENERATED using Large Language Models and WisPaper (A scholar search engine). It analyzes academic papers' tasks and contributions against retrieved prior work. While this system identifies POTENTIAL overlaps and novel directions, ITS COVERAGE IS NOT EXHAUSTIVE AND JUDGMENTS ARE APPROXIMATE. These results are intended to assist human reviewers and SHOULD NOT be relied upon as a definitive verdict on novelty.
NOTE that some papers exist in multiple, slightly different versions (e.g., with different titles or URLs). The system may retrieve several versions of the same underlying work. The current automated pipeline does not reliably align or distinguish these cases, so human reviewers will need to disambiguate them manually.
If you have any questions, please contact: mingzhang23@m.fudan.edu.cn

Overview

Overall Novelty Assessment

The paper proposes AIGB-Pearl, which combines generative planning with a trajectory evaluator and constrained policy optimization to improve auto-bidding beyond static offline datasets. It resides in the 'Generative Planning with Offline Reward Evaluation and Policy Search' leaf, which currently contains only this paper as its sole member. This positioning reflects a relatively sparse research direction within the broader generative auto-bidding landscape, suggesting the work occupies a niche intersection of generative modeling and policy search that has not been extensively explored in prior literature.

The taxonomy reveals that neighboring leaves include 'Q-Value Regularized Generative Bidding' and 'Expert-Guided Generative Bidding with Reward Shaping,' both of which integrate reward signals into generative frameworks but differ in their optimization mechanisms. The broader 'Generative Models with Reward-Based Optimization' branch contains only three leaves, indicating that reward-guided refinement of generative planners remains an emerging area. In contrast, the sibling branch 'Trajectory Generation with Conditional Generative Models' is more populated with transformer and diffusion-based methods, highlighting that pure supervised generative approaches are more established than those incorporating explicit policy search.

Among the three contributions analyzed, the core AIGB-Pearl method examined ten candidate papers with none providing clear refutation, while the practical synchronous coupling algorithm examined seven candidates with similar results. The KL-Lipschitz-constrained objective was not matched against any candidates in the search. This limited scope—seventeen total candidates examined—means the analysis captures top semantic matches and immediate citations but does not constitute an exhaustive survey. The absence of refutable prior work among these candidates suggests the specific combination of trajectory evaluators with KL-Lipschitz constraints is relatively unexplored within the examined literature.

Based on the top-seventeen semantic matches and taxonomy structure, the work appears to introduce a novel integration of generative planning and constrained policy optimization for auto-bidding. However, the limited search scope and sparse population of the target leaf mean this assessment reflects novelty within a focused subset of the literature rather than a comprehensive field-wide evaluation. The taxonomy indicates the broader generative auto-bidding area is active, but the specific evaluator-based policy search direction remains less crowded.

Taxonomy

Core-task Taxonomy Papers
32
3
Claimed Contributions
17
Contribution Candidate Papers Compared
0
Refutable Paper

Research Landscape Overview

Core task: Generative auto-bidding with offline reward evaluation and policy optimization. The field of auto-bidding has evolved into several distinct branches that reflect different modeling philosophies and application contexts. Generative Modeling Approaches for Auto-Bidding emphasize the use of generative architectures—such as diffusion models and transformer-based planners—to produce bidding strategies that can be refined through reward-based optimization, often leveraging offline data to avoid costly online exploration. Reinforcement Learning-Based Auto-Bidding focuses on value-function methods, policy gradient techniques, and multi-agent formulations that address the sequential decision-making nature of auctions, with works like Multi-Agent RTB[3] and Q-Regularized Auto-Bidding[23] exemplifying this direction. Auction Mechanism Design and Contextual Bidding investigates the interplay between auction rules, fairness constraints, and contextual information, as seen in Contextual Generative Auction[2] and Uniform Price Auctions[12]. Finally, Specialized Auto-Bidding Applications and Frameworks target domain-specific challenges such as cross-channel allocation, live advertising, and benchmark environments like AuctionGym Off-Policy[20]. Recent activity highlights a growing interest in combining generative planning with offline policy optimization, particularly for scenarios where online experimentation is expensive or risky. Generative Auto-bidding Offline[0] sits squarely within the generative modeling branch, emphasizing offline reward evaluation and policy search to refine bidding strategies without live deployment. This contrasts with more traditional RL approaches like Value-Guided Auto-Bidding[1], which relies on value-function approximation, and with hybrid methods such as Expert-Guided Diffusion Planner[28], which blends generative modeling with expert demonstrations. A key trade-off across these lines of work is the balance between model expressiveness and sample efficiency: generative models can capture complex bidding distributions but require careful reward shaping, while RL methods offer clearer convergence guarantees but may struggle with high-dimensional action spaces. Open questions remain around scalability, robustness to distribution shift, and the integration of fairness or budget constraints into generative frameworks.

Claimed Contributions

AIGB-Pearl method integrating generative planning and policy optimization

The authors introduce AIGB-Pearl, a method that enhances AI-Generated Bidding by constructing a trajectory evaluator to score generation quality and enabling the generative planner to explore beyond the offline dataset through policy optimization guided by the evaluator.

10 retrieved papers
KL-Lipschitz-constrained score maximization objective with provable sub-optimality bound

The authors propose a theoretically grounded optimization objective that constrains the planner using KL divergence and Lipschitz continuity requirements. This objective ensures reliable evaluator utilization and safe generalization beyond the offline dataset, supported by a formal sub-optimality bound.

0 retrieved papers
Practical algorithm with synchronous coupling for Lipschitz constraint enforcement

The authors design a practical implementation that uses synchronous coupling technique to enforce the Lipschitz constraint on the generative planner, providing a tighter upper bound on the Wasserstein distance and enabling effective constraint satisfaction during training.

7 retrieved papers

Core Task Comparisons

Comparisons with papers in the same taxonomy category

Within the taxonomy built over the current TopK core-task papers, the original paper is assigned to a leaf with no direct siblings and no cousin branches under the same grandparent topic. In this retrieved landscape, it appears structurally isolated, which is one partial signal of novelty, but still constrained by search coverage and taxonomy granularity.

Contribution Analysis

Detailed comparisons for each claimed contribution

Contribution

AIGB-Pearl method integrating generative planning and policy optimization

The authors introduce AIGB-Pearl, a method that enhances AI-Generated Bidding by constructing a trajectory evaluator to score generation quality and enabling the generative planner to explore beyond the offline dataset through policy optimization guided by the evaluator.

Contribution

KL-Lipschitz-constrained score maximization objective with provable sub-optimality bound

The authors propose a theoretically grounded optimization objective that constrains the planner using KL divergence and Lipschitz continuity requirements. This objective ensures reliable evaluator utilization and safe generalization beyond the offline dataset, supported by a formal sub-optimality bound.

Contribution

Practical algorithm with synchronous coupling for Lipschitz constraint enforcement

The authors design a practical implementation that uses synchronous coupling technique to enforce the Lipschitz constraint on the generative planner, providing a tighter upper bound on the Wasserstein distance and enabling effective constraint satisfaction during training.

Enhancing Generative Auto-bidding with Offline Reward Evaluation and Policy Search | Novelty Validation