Beyond a scalar: distributional serving interfaces let multiple task heads reuse watch-time distributions
_reachsumit · x · 2026-09-24
A paper proposes the Distributional Serving Interface (DSI) for watch-time prediction in short-video feeds.
- Problem: existing methods expose only a single watch-time estimate at serving time, giving downstream models no probabilities for completion, overplay, or other event regions.
- Method: DSI comprises a distribution provider, a compact low-dimensional summary, and lightweight per-task readouts. The provider learns a joint distribution over four watch states and their event times; duration-based rules remove incompatible combinations while a restoration loss preserves second-level accuracy. The summary outputs event probabilities, duration-relative time scales, and uncertainty statistics; after training, the provider is frozen and value/ranking readouts are trained to reuse the summary.
- Results: lowest MAE on KuaiRec, KuaiRand-1K, and WeChat21, beating the strongest of nine baselines by 1.9%–8.5%, with best XAUC on two datasets.
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