TUGB: A Two-stage Uncertainty-aware Generative Auto-Bidding Framework

Luzhan Yuan, Chao Mi, Xiahao Shi, Yi Mao, Shengsheng Niu +4

Generative modeling, particularly Decision Transformers, shows promise in auto-bidding strategies. However, it struggles with limited exploration in static offline datasets, vulnerability to dynamic environmental shifts, and a reliance on heuristic return-to-go (RTG) specifications that may yield suboptimal performance on unseen traffic. To address these challenges, we propose the Two-stage Uncertainty-aware Generative Auto-Bidding (TUGB) framework. TUGB integrates generative sequence modeling with Reinforcement Learning (RL). It employs a two-stage pipeline where a pre-trained Generative Bidding Model is fine-tuned via an ensemble-based Uncertainty-aware Environment Model. This approach quantifies epistemic uncertainty to penalize high-risk trajectories and evolves the policy from RTG-conditioning to direct bidding optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TUGB significantly outperforms SOTA baselines. Notably, full-scale deployment on JD Search Ad achieved a 2.32\% increase in cost and 3.57\% in target cost, validating its industrial efficacy, while its successful adaptation to subsequent mechanism upgrades and JD Food Delivery Ad further validates TUGB's superior…