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Main Authors: Wu, Weichang, Zhang, Xiaolu, Zhou, Jun, Li, Yuchen, Xia, Wenwen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11053
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author Wu, Weichang
Zhang, Xiaolu
Zhou, Jun
Li, Yuchen
Xia, Wenwen
author_facet Wu, Weichang
Zhang, Xiaolu
Zhou, Jun
Li, Yuchen
Xia, Wenwen
contents User Behavior Sequence (UBS) modeling is crucial in industrial applications. As data scale and task diversity grow, UBS pretraining methods have become increasingly pivotal. State-of-the-art UBS pretraining methods rely on predicting behavior distributions. The key step in these methods is constructing a selected behavior vocabulary. However, this manual step is labor-intensive and prone to bias. The limitation of vocabulary capacity also directly affects models' generalization ability. In this paper, we introduce Bootstrapping Your Behavior (\model{}), a novel UBS pretraining strategy that predicts an automatically constructed supervision embedding summarizing all behaviors' information within a future time window, eliminating the manual behavior vocabulary selection. In implementation, we incorporate a student-teacher encoder scheme to construct the pretraining supervision effectively. Experiments on two real-world industrial datasets and eight downstream tasks demonstrate that \model{} achieves an average improvement of 3.9\% in AUC and 98.9\% in training throughput. Notably, the model exhibits meaningful attention patterns and cluster representations during pretraining without any label supervision. In our online deployment over two months, the pretrained model improves the KS by about 2.7\% and 7.1\% over the baseline model for two financial overdue risk prediction tasks in the Alipay mobile application, which reduces bad debt risk by millions of dollars for Ant group.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_11053
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bootstrapping your behavior: a new pretraining strategy for user behavior sequence data
Wu, Weichang
Zhang, Xiaolu
Zhou, Jun
Li, Yuchen
Xia, Wenwen
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
User Behavior Sequence (UBS) modeling is crucial in industrial applications. As data scale and task diversity grow, UBS pretraining methods have become increasingly pivotal. State-of-the-art UBS pretraining methods rely on predicting behavior distributions. The key step in these methods is constructing a selected behavior vocabulary. However, this manual step is labor-intensive and prone to bias. The limitation of vocabulary capacity also directly affects models' generalization ability. In this paper, we introduce Bootstrapping Your Behavior (\model{}), a novel UBS pretraining strategy that predicts an automatically constructed supervision embedding summarizing all behaviors' information within a future time window, eliminating the manual behavior vocabulary selection. In implementation, we incorporate a student-teacher encoder scheme to construct the pretraining supervision effectively. Experiments on two real-world industrial datasets and eight downstream tasks demonstrate that \model{} achieves an average improvement of 3.9\% in AUC and 98.9\% in training throughput. Notably, the model exhibits meaningful attention patterns and cluster representations during pretraining without any label supervision. In our online deployment over two months, the pretrained model improves the KS by about 2.7\% and 7.1\% over the baseline model for two financial overdue risk prediction tasks in the Alipay mobile application, which reduces bad debt risk by millions of dollars for Ant group.
title Bootstrapping your behavior: a new pretraining strategy for user behavior sequence data
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11053