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Main Authors: Dai, Xiangxiang, Sun, Xiaowei, Zuo, Jinhang, Liu, Xutong, Lui, John C. S.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22254
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author Dai, Xiangxiang
Sun, Xiaowei
Zuo, Jinhang
Liu, Xutong
Lui, John C. S.
author_facet Dai, Xiangxiang
Sun, Xiaowei
Zuo, Jinhang
Liu, Xutong
Lui, John C. S.
contents Co-branding has become a vital strategy for businesses aiming to expand market reach within recommendation systems. However, identifying effective cross-industry partnerships remains challenging due to resource imbalances, uncertain brand willingness, and ever-changing market conditions. In this paper, we provide the first systematic study of this problem and propose a unified online-offline framework to enable co-branding recommendations. Our approach begins by constructing a bipartite graph linking ``initiating'' and ``target'' brands to quantify co-branding probabilities and assess market benefits. During the online learning phase, we dynamically update the graph in response to market feedback, while striking a balance between exploring new collaborations for long-term gains and exploiting established partnerships for immediate benefits. To address the high initial co-branding costs, our framework mitigates redundant exploration, thereby enhancing short-term performance while ensuring sustainable strategic growth. In the offline optimization phase, our framework consolidates the interests of multiple sub-brands under the same parent brand to maximize overall returns, avoid excessive investment in single sub-brands, and reduce unnecessary costs associated with over-prioritizing a single sub-brand. We present a theoretical analysis of our approach, establishing a highly nontrivial sublinear regret bound for online learning in the complex co-branding problem, and enhancing the approximation guarantee for the NP-hard offline budget allocation optimization. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world co-branding datasets demonstrate the practical effectiveness of our framework, with at least 12\% improvement.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_22254
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Unified Online-Offline Framework for Co-Branding Campaign Recommendations
Dai, Xiangxiang
Sun, Xiaowei
Zuo, Jinhang
Liu, Xutong
Lui, John C. S.
Machine Learning
Co-branding has become a vital strategy for businesses aiming to expand market reach within recommendation systems. However, identifying effective cross-industry partnerships remains challenging due to resource imbalances, uncertain brand willingness, and ever-changing market conditions. In this paper, we provide the first systematic study of this problem and propose a unified online-offline framework to enable co-branding recommendations. Our approach begins by constructing a bipartite graph linking ``initiating'' and ``target'' brands to quantify co-branding probabilities and assess market benefits. During the online learning phase, we dynamically update the graph in response to market feedback, while striking a balance between exploring new collaborations for long-term gains and exploiting established partnerships for immediate benefits. To address the high initial co-branding costs, our framework mitigates redundant exploration, thereby enhancing short-term performance while ensuring sustainable strategic growth. In the offline optimization phase, our framework consolidates the interests of multiple sub-brands under the same parent brand to maximize overall returns, avoid excessive investment in single sub-brands, and reduce unnecessary costs associated with over-prioritizing a single sub-brand. We present a theoretical analysis of our approach, establishing a highly nontrivial sublinear regret bound for online learning in the complex co-branding problem, and enhancing the approximation guarantee for the NP-hard offline budget allocation optimization. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world co-branding datasets demonstrate the practical effectiveness of our framework, with at least 12\% improvement.
title A Unified Online-Offline Framework for Co-Branding Campaign Recommendations
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22254