How reinforcement learning chooses the ads you see

Every day, digital advertisement agencies serve billions of ads on news websites, search engines, social media networks, video streaming websites, and other platforms. And they all want to answer the same question: Which of the many ads they have in their catalog is more likely to appeal to a certain viewer? Finding the right answer to this question can have a huge impact on revenue when you are dealing with hundreds of websites, thousands of ads, and millions of visitors. Fortunately (for the ad agencies, at least), reinforcement learning (RL), the branch of artificial intelligence that has become renowned for mastering board and video games, provides a solution. Reinforcement learning models seek to maximize rewards.