HMAF: New Framework Optimizes Ad Allocation Between Guaranteed Delivery and Real-Time Bidding
Researchers have developed HMAF, a hierarchical framework that optimizes how advertising impressions are allocated between guaranteed delivery contracts and real-time bidding auctions on online platforms. The framework combines offline planning with online decision-making to balance revenue maximization with contract fulfillment across multiple ad slots. When implemented at Meituan, a major food delivery platform, it increased guaranteed delivery rates by 3.72% and total ad revenue by 1.59%.
HMAF (Hierarchical Multi-Slot Allocation Framework) addresses a key challenge in modern online advertising: how to effectively manage both guaranteed delivery (GD) contracts—where advertisers pay upfront for a set number of impressions—and real-time bidding (RTB) auctions that maximize short-term revenue. Previous approaches either treated these two systems separately or relied on simple priority rules, failing to optimize both simultaneously. The new framework uses a Plan-Calibrate-Execute structure that integrates offline constraint optimization with real-time decision-making, allowing platforms to plan GD resources, dynamically adjust GD-RTB competition, and make ranking decisions across multiple ad slots. The system has been deployed in multiple scenarios at Meituan, one of the world's largest online food delivery platforms, where it demonstrated measurable improvements in both delivery rate and revenue.
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- arXiv cs.LGCenter
HMAF: A Hierarchical Multi-Slot GD-RTB Allocation Framework
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