TAR: Generative Auto-Bidding and Budget Pacing via Multi-Scale Trajectory Modeling

Auto-bidding and budget pacing are formulated as sequential decision-making tasks. While flexible, such a framework faces a fundamental granularity mismatch: decisions are made at a fine temporal scale, while their performance feedback is fully and reliably observable at a much coarser resolution. This manifests as sparse reward signals and delayed feedback, forcing agents to learn from locally noisy and incomplete signals. We address this core challenge by introducing the Trajectory Auto-Regressive Model (TAR), a generative framework that aligns planning resolution with feedback dynamics. Motivated by the insight that coarser temporal aggregation yields denser rewards and less scattered feedback, TAR generates trajectories in a coarse-to-fine manner. It incorporates three key innovations: (1) progressive trajectory generation across multiple temporal scales; (2) latent-space compression via a multi-scale VQVAE to handle heterogeneous feature types; and (3) state-action integration that captures long-term dependencies without auxiliary inverse models. Comprehensive experiments in both sparse-reward and delayed-feedback settings demonstrate that TAR consistently outperforms strong baselines in offline simulations and online deployment, validating its effectiveness in overcoming the granularity mismatch for more stable and robust advertising optimization.