SHORE: A Long-term User Lifetime Value Prediction Model in Digital Games

In digital gaming, long-term user lifetime value (LTV) prediction is essential for monetization strategy, yet presents major challenges due to delayed payment behavior, sparse early user data, and the presence of high-value outliers. While existing models typically rely on either short-cycle observations or strong distributional assumptions, such approaches often underestimate long-term value or suffer from poor robustness. To address these issues, we propose SHort-cycle auxiliary with Order-preserving REgression (SHORE), a novel LTV prediction framework that integrates short-horizon predictions (e.g., LTV-15 and LTV-30) as auxiliary tasks to enhance long-cycle targets (e.g., LTV-60). SHORE also introduces a hybrid loss function combining order-preserving multi-class classification and a dynamic Huber loss to mitigate the influence of zero-inflation and outlier payment behavior. Extensive offline and online experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that SHORE significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving a 47.91\% relative reduction in prediction error in online deployment. These results highlight SHORE's practical effectiveness and robustness in industrial-scale LTV prediction for digital games.

HIT Model: A Hierarchical Interaction-Enhanced Two-Tower Model for Pre-Ranking Systems

Online display advertising platforms rely on pre-ranking systems to efficiently filter and prioritize candidate ads from large corpora, balancing relevance to users with strict computational constraints. The prevailing two-tower architecture, though highly efficient due to its decoupled design and pre-caching, suffers from cross-domain interaction and coarse similarity metrics, undermining its capacity to model complex user-ad relationships. In this study, we propose the Hierarchical Interaction-Enhanced Two-Tower (HIT) model, a new architecture that augments the two-tower paradigm with two key components: $\textit{generators}$ that pre-generate holistic vectors incorporating coarse-grained user-ad interactions through a dual-generator framework with a cosine-similarity-based generation loss as the training objective, and $\textit{multi-head representers}$ that project embeddings into multiple latent subspaces to capture fine-grained, multi-faceted user interests and multi-dimensional ad attributes. This design enhances modeling effectiveness without compromising inference efficiency. Extensive experiments on public datasets and large-scale online A/B testing on Tencent's advertising platform demonstrate that HIT significantly outperforms several baselines in relevance metrics, yielding a $1.66\%$ increase in Gross Merchandise Volume and a $1.55\%$ improvement in Return on Investment, alongside similar serving latency to the vanilla two-tower models. The HIT model has been successfully deployed in Tencent's online display advertising system, serving billions of impressions daily. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HIT_model-5C23.