Fast and Feasible: Permutation-based Constrained Reranking for Revenue Maximization

Search and recommender systems have produced highly relevant search results. A natural next step in the development of such systems in e-commerce is to rerank these results to increase the platform's revenue from paid promotion products. However, maximizing revenue alone may degrade the user experience by reducing relevance or increasing fraud risk. To avoid this, we state the reranking problem as an integer linear program ($ILP$) that maximizes revenue subject to per-query constraints on other metrics, e.g., relevance. Since solving $ILP$ exactly for every query is slow for deployment to the online service, we propose a lightweight permutation-based reranking approximation algorithm PermR. At each step, the algorithm selects a pair of neighboring items and swaps them to either improve the objective or repair a violated constraint. We evaluate PermR across multiple categories of a large classified platform in offline and online settings. PermR achieves about 63\% of the ILP revenue improvement, within production latency limits, preserving all constraints. In a 14-day online A/B test over 56 million search queries, PermR increased revenue by $2$\%.

BAT: Benchmark for Auto-bidding Task

The optimization of bidding strategies for online advertising slot auctions presents a critical challenge across numerous digital marketplaces. A significant obstacle to the development, evaluation, and refinement of real-time autobidding algorithms is the scarcity of comprehensive datasets and standardized benchmarks. To address this deficiency, we present an auction benchmark encompassing the two most prevalent auction formats. We implement a series of robust baselines on a novel dataset, addressing the most salient Real-Time Bidding (RTB) problem domains: budget pacing uniformity and Cost Per Click (CPC) constraint optimization. This benchmark provides a user-friendly and intuitive framework for researchers and practitioners to develop and refine innovative autobidding algorithms, thereby facilitating advancements in the field of programmatic advertising. The implementation and additional resources can be accessed at the following repository (https://github.com/avito-tech/bat-autobidding-benchmark, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14794182).