Learning Universal User Representations Leveraging Cross-domain User Intent at Snapchat

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ju, Clark Mingxuan, Neves, Leonardo, Kumar, Bhuvesh, Collins, Liam, Zhao, Tong, Qiu, Yuwei, Dou, Qing, Zhou, Yang, Nizam, Sohail, Ozturk, Rengim, Liu, Yvette, Yang, Sen, Malik, Manish, Shah, Neil
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915333775818752
author Ju, Clark Mingxuan
Neves, Leonardo
Kumar, Bhuvesh
Collins, Liam
Zhao, Tong
Qiu, Yuwei
Dou, Qing
Zhou, Yang
Nizam, Sohail
Ozturk, Rengim
Liu, Yvette
Yang, Sen
Malik, Manish
Shah, Neil
author_facet Ju, Clark Mingxuan
Neves, Leonardo
Kumar, Bhuvesh
Collins, Liam
Zhao, Tong
Qiu, Yuwei
Dou, Qing
Zhou, Yang
Nizam, Sohail
Ozturk, Rengim
Liu, Yvette
Yang, Sen
Malik, Manish
Shah, Neil
contents The development of powerful user representations is a key factor in the success of recommender systems (RecSys). Online platforms employ a range of RecSys techniques to personalize user experience across diverse in-app surfaces. User representations are often learned individually through user's historical interactions within each surface and user representations across different surfaces can be shared post-hoc as auxiliary features or additional retrieval sources. While effective, such schemes cannot directly encode collaborative filtering signals across different surfaces, hindering its capacity to discover complex relationships between user behaviors and preferences across the whole platform. To bridge this gap at Snapchat, we seek to conduct universal user modeling (UUM) across different in-app surfaces, learning general-purpose user representations which encode behaviors across surfaces. Instead of replacing domain-specific representations, UUM representations capture cross-domain trends, enriching existing representations with complementary information. This work discusses our efforts in developing initial UUM versions, practical challenges, technical choices and modeling and research directions with promising offline performance. Following successful A/B testing, UUM representations have been launched in production, powering multiple use cases and demonstrating their value. UUM embedding has been incorporated into (i) Long-form Video embedding-based retrieval, leading to 2.78% increase in Long-form Video Open Rate, (ii) Long-form Video L2 ranking, with 19.2% increase in Long-form Video View Time sum, (iii) Lens L2 ranking, leading to 1.76% increase in Lens play time, and (iv) Notification L2 ranking, with 0.87% increase in Notification Open Rate.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_21838
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Universal User Representations Leveraging Cross-domain User Intent at Snapchat
Ju, Clark Mingxuan
Neves, Leonardo
Kumar, Bhuvesh
Collins, Liam
Zhao, Tong
Qiu, Yuwei
Dou, Qing
Zhou, Yang
Nizam, Sohail
Ozturk, Rengim
Liu, Yvette
Yang, Sen
Malik, Manish
Shah, Neil
Information Retrieval
The development of powerful user representations is a key factor in the success of recommender systems (RecSys). Online platforms employ a range of RecSys techniques to personalize user experience across diverse in-app surfaces. User representations are often learned individually through user's historical interactions within each surface and user representations across different surfaces can be shared post-hoc as auxiliary features or additional retrieval sources. While effective, such schemes cannot directly encode collaborative filtering signals across different surfaces, hindering its capacity to discover complex relationships between user behaviors and preferences across the whole platform. To bridge this gap at Snapchat, we seek to conduct universal user modeling (UUM) across different in-app surfaces, learning general-purpose user representations which encode behaviors across surfaces. Instead of replacing domain-specific representations, UUM representations capture cross-domain trends, enriching existing representations with complementary information. This work discusses our efforts in developing initial UUM versions, practical challenges, technical choices and modeling and research directions with promising offline performance. Following successful A/B testing, UUM representations have been launched in production, powering multiple use cases and demonstrating their value. UUM embedding has been incorporated into (i) Long-form Video embedding-based retrieval, leading to 2.78% increase in Long-form Video Open Rate, (ii) Long-form Video L2 ranking, with 19.2% increase in Long-form Video View Time sum, (iii) Lens L2 ranking, leading to 1.76% increase in Lens play time, and (iv) Notification L2 ranking, with 0.87% increase in Notification Open Rate.
title Learning Universal User Representations Leveraging Cross-domain User Intent at Snapchat
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21838