# Ad Headline Generation using Self-Critical Masked Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06818 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06818/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01759/) (2016)
- [Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03197/) (2019)
- [Sequence Level Training with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06732/) (2015)
- [Self-critical Sequence Training for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00563/) (2016)
- [Leveraging Pre-trained Checkpoints for Sequence Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12461/) (2019)
- [An Actor-Critic Algorithm for Sequence Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.07086/) (2016)
- [Relevance of Unsupervised Metrics in Task-Oriented Dialogue for Evaluating Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09799/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Pretraining for Sequence to Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02683/) (2016)
- [Clickbait? Sensational Headline Generation with Auto-tuned Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03582/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [COBART: Controlled, Optimized, Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformer for Ad Headline Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08071/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

For any E-commerce website it is a nontrivial problem to build enduring advertisements that attract shoppers. It is hard to pass the creative quality bar of the website, especially at a large scale. We thus propose a programmatic solution to generate product advertising headlines using retail content. We propose a state of the art application of Reinforcement Learning (RL) Policy gradient methods on Transformer based Masked Language Models. Our method creates the advertising headline by jointly conditioning on multiple products that a seller wishes to advertise. We demonstrate that our method outperforms existing Transformer and LSTM + RL methods in overlap metrics and quality audits. We also show that our model-generated headlines outperform human submitted headlines in terms of both grammar and creative quality as determined by audits.