Break the Inaccessible Boundary: Distilling Post-Conversion Content for User Retention Modeling

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ma, Tianbao, Yang, Ruochen, Li, Chengen, Shi, Yuexin, Cao, Jiangxia, Chen, Linxun, Liu, Zhaojie, Niu, Yanan, Li, Han, Gai, Kun
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Ma, Tianbao
Yang, Ruochen
Li, Chengen
Shi, Yuexin
Cao, Jiangxia
Chen, Linxun
Liu, Zhaojie
Niu, Yanan
Li, Han
Gai, Kun
author_facet Ma, Tianbao
Yang, Ruochen
Li, Chengen
Shi, Yuexin
Cao, Jiangxia
Chen, Linxun
Liu, Zhaojie
Niu, Yanan
Li, Han
Gai, Kun
contents User retention is a key metric to measure long-term engagement in modern platforms. In real-time bidding (RTB) advertising system for user re-engagement, the retention model is required to predict future revisit probability at bidding time, before the user converts and consumes any content. Although post-conversion content, termed Onboarding Content, provides highly informative signals for retention prediction, directly using it in training causes severe feature leakage and creates a gap between training and serving. To address this issue, we propose OCARM, a two-stage distillation-aligned framework for Onboarding Content Augmented Retention Modeling, enabling the model to implicitly capture future content using only observable features during inference. In the first stage, we deliberately expose onboarding content to train a hierarchical encoder that produces teacher representations. In the second stage, a user encoder is aligned with the frozen teacher through distillation, allowing the model to approximate the inaccessible onboarding signals without leakage. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B tests demonstrate that our framework achieves consistent improvements in a real-world growth scenario.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_25839
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Break the Inaccessible Boundary: Distilling Post-Conversion Content for User Retention Modeling
Ma, Tianbao
Yang, Ruochen
Li, Chengen
Shi, Yuexin
Cao, Jiangxia
Chen, Linxun
Liu, Zhaojie
Niu, Yanan
Li, Han
Gai, Kun
Information Retrieval
User retention is a key metric to measure long-term engagement in modern platforms. In real-time bidding (RTB) advertising system for user re-engagement, the retention model is required to predict future revisit probability at bidding time, before the user converts and consumes any content. Although post-conversion content, termed Onboarding Content, provides highly informative signals for retention prediction, directly using it in training causes severe feature leakage and creates a gap between training and serving. To address this issue, we propose OCARM, a two-stage distillation-aligned framework for Onboarding Content Augmented Retention Modeling, enabling the model to implicitly capture future content using only observable features during inference. In the first stage, we deliberately expose onboarding content to train a hierarchical encoder that produces teacher representations. In the second stage, a user encoder is aligned with the frozen teacher through distillation, allowing the model to approximate the inaccessible onboarding signals without leakage. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B tests demonstrate that our framework achieves consistent improvements in a real-world growth scenario.
title Break the Inaccessible Boundary: Distilling Post-Conversion Content for User Retention Modeling
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25839