DiffAuction: An Auction-Driven Framework for Generative Image Advertising

Diffusion models create an opportunity for advertising in generated visual content, with multiple advertisers competing for exposure within a shared image. Yet existing approaches are computationally costly when generating images under varying target-share configurations, and it remains unclear how the resulting outcomes should be evaluated and priced. To address these gaps, we propose DiffAuction, an auction framework connecting controllable generation, click-intent evaluation, and auction design. First, our training-free Residual Share Calibration (RSC) decomposes joint-attention updates into product-specific residuals and rescales them according to target shares. Because a fixed prompt tends to produce similar viewpoints that favor the same products regardless of their target shares, we further introduce Share-Conditioned Prompting (SCP) to adapt the viewpoint to each desired allocation. Second, we develop an evaluator that uses a VLM to extract visual evidence and an LLM to assess Click-Through Intent (CTI), a proxy for click propensity, along four dimensions: Product Prominence, Brand Recognizability, Scene Integration, and Contextual Value Communication. We validate its assessments against judgments from 10 trained annotators on 1,000 images. Third, we formulate this advertising setting as an auction over jointly feasible generation configurations. Each configuration has a public expected CTI vector, while advertisers hold configuration-specific private values per unit of CTI that map click intent into commercial value. We adopt a learnable affine maximizer auction (AMA), which jointly selects a shared generation configuration and determines advertiser-specific payments to maximize expected platform revenue. The resulting allocation and payment rules guarantee dominant-strategy incentive compatibility (DSIC) and individual rationality (IR). Experiments show that our generation method strengthens the monotonic relationship between target shares and CTI relative to baselines, while the learned AMA achieves higher platform revenue in the resulting auction setting.