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  4. Auto-Bidding in Real-Time Auctions via Oracle Imitation Learning
 
conference paper

Auto-Bidding in Real-Time Auctions via Oracle Imitation Learning

Chiappa, Alberto Silvio  
•
Gangopadhyay, Briti
•
Wang, Zhao
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August 3, 2025
KDD '25: Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.2
31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 2025

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 best bid for an impression opportunity is challenging, due to the stochastic nature of user behavior and the variability of advertisement traffic over time. In this work, we propose a framework for training auto-bidding agents in multi-slot second-price auctions to maximize acquisitions (e.g., clicks, conversions) while adhering to budget and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) constraints. We exploit the insight that, after an advertisement campaign concludes, determining the optimal bids for each impression opportunity can be framed as a multiple-choice knapsack problem (MCKP) with a nonlinear objective. We propose an ''oracle'' algorithm that identifies a near-optimal combination of impression opportunities and advertisement slots, considering both past and future advertisement traffic data. This oracle solution serves as a training target for a student network which bids having access only to real-time information, a method we term Oracle Imitation Learning (OIL). Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate that OIL achieves superior performance compared to both online and offline reinforcement learning algorithms, offering improved sample efficiency. Notably, OIL shifts the complexity of training auto-bidding agents from crafting sophisticated learning algorithms to solving a nonlinear constrained optimization problem efficiently. Code available at https://github.com/sony/oil

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3711896.3736850
Author(s)
Chiappa, Alberto Silvio  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Gangopadhyay, Briti
Wang, Zhao
Takamatsu, Shingo
Date Issued

2025-08-03

Publisher

ACM

Publisher place

New York, NY, USA

Published in
KDD '25: Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.2
ISBN of the book

979-8-4007-1454-2

Start page

345

End page

356

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
EPFL  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 2025

KDD '25

Toronto ON Canada

2025-08-03 - 2025-08-07

Available on Infoscience
August 20, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/253247
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