# MIRT: Transformers for Truthful Generative Auctions with Whole-feed Permutation Externalities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06559 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06559/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Deep Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06114/) (2017)
- [Neural Combinatorial Optimization with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09940/) (2016)
- [POMO: Policy Optimization with Multiple Optima for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16011/) (2020)
- [Winner Takes It All: Training Performant RL Populations for Combinatorial Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03475/) (2022)
- [Machine Learning-powered Iterative Combinatorial Auctions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08042/) (2019)
- [LLM-Powered Preference Elicitation in Combinatorial Assignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10308/) (2025)
- [EGA-V2: An End-to-end Generative Framework for Industrial Advertising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17549/) (2025)
- [Contextual Generative Auction with Permutation-level Externalities for Online Advertising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11544/) (2024)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Combinatorial Auctions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08022/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern online platforms commonly rank ads and organic content separately before blending them into a feed displayed to the user, overlooking externalities: an item's click-through rate depends on its surrounding content, not only on its own position. Recent learning-based feed generation mechanisms model some of these cross-type interactions to globally optimize for the whole feed's welfare. However, these approaches either fix the ordering of organic content, or lack exact strategyproofness guarantees for bidders. To combat these shortfalls, we introduce the Maximal-in-Range Transformer (MIRT) mechanism class, which uses a transformer to generate a range of candidate feeds that jointly order ads and organic content, and selects the welfare-maximizing feed in the range. However, there is a tension: strategyproofness requires the generated range to be bid-independent, even though a candidate feed's welfare depends linearly on the bids. Our key technical contribution is a reinforcement learning approach that incorporates both candidate generation and bid-aware selection into training, enabling a bid-independent transformer to learn to generate high-welfare ranges by accounting for both individual feed quality and the collective quality of the range. Additionally, we bound the pseudo-dimension of the MIRT class under hard attention, showing that near-optimal expected welfare is learnable with sample complexity polynomial in the transformer size and only logarithmic in the range size. Empirically, MIRT outperforms the previous non-strategyproof state-of-the-art feed models while remaining exactly strategyproof. Our results show that transformer-based auctions can deliver externality-aware whole-feed optimization without sacrificing exact incentive compatibility, removing a major obstacle to their practical deployment.