player2vec: A Language Modeling Approach to Understand Player Behavior in Games

Methods for learning latent user representations from historical behavior logs have gained traction for recommendation tasks in e-commerce, content streaming, and other settings. However, this area still remains relatively underexplored in video and mobile gaming contexts. In this work, we present a novel method for overcoming this limitation by extending a long-range Transformer model from the natural language processing domain to player behavior data. We discuss specifics of behavior tracking in games and propose preprocessing and tokenization approaches by viewing in-game events in an analogous way to words in sentences, thus enabling learning player representations in a self-supervised manner in the absence of ground-truth annotations. We experimentally demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach in fitting the distribution of behavior events by evaluating intrinsic language modeling metrics. Furthermore, we qualitatively analyze the emerging structure of the learned embedding space and show its value for generating insights into behavior patterns to inform downstream applications.

Accelerate Model Parallel Training by Using Efficient Graph Traversal Order in Device Placement

Modern neural networks require long training to reach decent performance on massive datasets. One common approach to speed up training is model parallelization, where large neural networks are split across multiple devices. However, different device placements of the same neural network lead to different training times. Most of the existing device placement solutions treat the problem as sequential decision-making by traversing neural network graphs and assigning their neurons to different devices. This work studies the impact of graph traversal order on device placement. In particular, we empirically study how different graph traversal order leads to different device placement, which in turn affects the training execution time. Our experiment results show that the best graph traversal order depends on the type of neural networks and their computation graphs features. In this work, we also provide recommendations on choosing graph traversal order in device placement for various neural network families to improve the training time in model parallelization.