{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/modeling-user-retention-through-generative","title":"Modeling User Retention through Generative Flow Networks","arxiv_id":"2406.06043","date":"2024-06-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ziru Liu","Shuchang Liu","Bin Yang","Zhenghai Xue","Qingpeng Cai","Xiangyu Zhao","Zijian Zhang","Lantao Hu","Han Li","Peng Jiang"],"abstract":"Recommender systems aim to fulfill the user's daily demands. While most existing research focuses on maximizing the user's engagement with the system, it has recently been pointed out that how frequently the users come back for the service also reflects the quality and stability of recommendations. However, optimizing this user retention behavior is non-trivial and poses several challenges including the intractable leave-and-return user activities, the sparse and delayed signal, and the uncertain relations between users' retention and their immediate feedback towards each item in the recommendation list. In this work, we regard the retention signal as an overall estimation of the user's end-of-session satisfaction and propose to estimate this signal through a probabilistic flow. This flow-based modeling technique can back-propagate the retention reward towards each recommended item in the user session, and we show that the flow combined with traditional learning-to-rank objectives eventually optimizes a non-discounted cumulative reward for both immediate user feedback and user retention. We verify the effectiveness of our method through both offline empirical studies on two public datasets and online A/B tests in an industrial platform.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06043v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.06043v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"modeling-user-retention-through-generative","repo_url":"https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/GFN4Retention","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"learning-to-rank","task_name":"Learning-To-Rank"},{"task_slug":"recommendation-systems","task_name":"Recommendation Systems"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":null,"method_name":null}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2406.06043","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2406.06043"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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