A Novel Framework Leveraging Large Language Models to Enhance Cold-Start Advertising Systems

Albin Uruqi, Iosif Viktoratos () and Athanasios Tsadiras
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Albin Uruqi: Department of Computer Science, American College of Thessaloniki, 55535 Pilea, Greece
Iosif Viktoratos: Department of Computer Science, American College of Thessaloniki, 55535 Pilea, Greece
Athanasios Tsadiras: School of Economics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece

Future Internet, 2025, vol. 17, issue 8, 1-21

Abstract: The cold-start problem remains a critical challenge in personalized advertising, where users with limited or no interaction history often receive suboptimal recommendations. This study introduces a novel, three-stage framework that systematically integrates transformer architectures and large language models (LLMs) to improve recommendation accuracy, transparency, and user experience throughout the entire advertising pipeline. The proposed approach begins with transformer-enhanced feature extraction, leveraging self-attention and learned positional encodings to capture deep semantic relationships among users, ads, and context. It then employs an ensemble integration strategy combining enhanced state-of-the-art models with optimized aggregation for robust prediction. Finally, an LLM-driven enhancement module performs semantic reranking, personalized message refinement, and natural language explanation generation while also addressing cold-start scenarios through pre-trained knowledge. The LLM component further supports diversification, fairness-aware ranking, and sentiment sensitivity in order to ensure more relevant, diverse, and ethically grounded recommendations. Extensive experiments on DigiX and Avazu datasets demonstrate notable gains in click-through rate prediction (CTR), while an in-depth real user evaluation showcases improvements in perceived ad relevance, message quality, transparency, and trust. This work advances the state-of-the-art by combining CTR models with interpretability and contextual reasoning. The strengths of the proposed method, such as its innovative integration of components, empirical validation, multifaceted LLM application, and ethical alignment highlight its potential as a robust, future-ready solution for personalized advertising.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; machine learning; click-through rate (CTR); artificial neural networks; cold-start; large language models (LLMs) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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