CONFLUX: A Request-level Fusion Framework for Impression Allocation via Cascade Distillation

Guaranteed delivery (GD) and real-time bidding (RTB) constitute two parallel profit streams for the publisher. The diverse advertiser demands (brand or instant effect) result in different selling (in bulk or via auction) and pricing (fixed unit price or various bids) patterns, which naturally raises the fusion allocation issue of breaking the two markets' barrier and selling out at the global highest price boosting the total revenue. The fusion process complicates the competition between GD and RTB, and GD contracts with overlapping targeting. The non-stationary user traffic and bid landscape further worsen the situation, making the assignment unsupervised and hard to evaluate. Thus, a static policy or coarse-grained modeling from existing work is inferior to facing the above challenges.