Relative Advantage Debiasing for Watch-Time Prediction in Short-Video Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Liu, Emily, Han, Kuan, Zhan, Minfeng, Zhao, Bocheng, Mu, Guanyu, Song, Yang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Liu, Emily
Han, Kuan
Zhan, Minfeng
Zhao, Bocheng
Mu, Guanyu
Song, Yang
author_facet Liu, Emily
Han, Kuan
Zhan, Minfeng
Zhao, Bocheng
Mu, Guanyu
Song, Yang
contents Watch time is widely used as a proxy for user satisfaction in video recommendation platforms. However, raw watch times are influenced by confounding factors such as video duration, popularity, and individual user behaviors, potentially distorting preference signals and resulting in biased recommendation models. We propose a novel relative advantage debiasing framework that corrects watch time by comparing it to empirically derived reference distributions conditioned on user and item groups. This approach yields a quantile-based preference signal and introduces a two-stage architecture that explicitly separates distribution estimation from preference learning. Additionally, we present distributional embeddings to efficiently parameterize watch-time quantiles without requiring online sampling or storage of historical data. Both offline and online experiments demonstrate significant improvements in recommendation accuracy and robustness compared to existing baseline methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_11086
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Relative Advantage Debiasing for Watch-Time Prediction in Short-Video Recommendation
Liu, Emily
Han, Kuan
Zhan, Minfeng
Zhao, Bocheng
Mu, Guanyu
Song, Yang
Machine Learning
Information Retrieval
Watch time is widely used as a proxy for user satisfaction in video recommendation platforms. However, raw watch times are influenced by confounding factors such as video duration, popularity, and individual user behaviors, potentially distorting preference signals and resulting in biased recommendation models. We propose a novel relative advantage debiasing framework that corrects watch time by comparing it to empirically derived reference distributions conditioned on user and item groups. This approach yields a quantile-based preference signal and introduces a two-stage architecture that explicitly separates distribution estimation from preference learning. Additionally, we present distributional embeddings to efficiently parameterize watch-time quantiles without requiring online sampling or storage of historical data. Both offline and online experiments demonstrate significant improvements in recommendation accuracy and robustness compared to existing baseline methods.
title Relative Advantage Debiasing for Watch-Time Prediction in Short-Video Recommendation
topic Machine Learning
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11086