A Long-term Value Prediction Framework In Video Ranking

Accurately modeling long-term value (LTV) at the ranking stage of short-video recommendation systems remains a practical challenge. Though production systems and recent research have begun exploring delayed feedback and extended user engagement, modeling LTV with fine-grained attribution and robust positional normalization for billion-scale platforms is underdeveloped. In this work, we present a practical ranking-stage LTV framework that systematically addresses three core challenges: position bias, attribution ambiguity, and temporal limitations. First, to address position bias in sequential video feeds, we introduce a Position-aware Debias Quantile (PDQ) module that normalizes engagement signals using quantile-based distributions, enabling position-robust LTV estimation without requiring architectural changes. Second, we propose a multi-dimensional attribution module that learns continuous strengths across contextual, behavioral, and content-related signals, moving beyond static rule sets to capture nuanced influences among videos. Explicit noise filtering is incorporated via a customized hybrid loss, improving causal clarity in LTV attribution. Third, our cross-temporal author modeling module constructs censoring-aware, day-level long-term value targets, capturing creator-driven re-engagement over extended time windows. While our framework currently focuses on the author dimension, it is readily extensible to further aspects such as topics or styles. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B tests demonstrate statistically significant gains in LTV-related metrics and stable trade-offs with short?term objectives. The framework is realized as task augmentation within an existing ranking model, facilitates billion-scale deployment on Taobao's production system with efficient training and serving, achieving sustained user engagement improvements while remaining compatible with industrial constraints.