# User Retention-oriented Recommendation with Decision Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.06347 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06347/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Agent4Ranking: Semantic Robust Ranking via Personalized Query Rewriting Using Multi-agent LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15450/) (2023)
- [A Simple Unified Uncertainty-Guided Framework for Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07541/) (2023)
- [DNS-Rec: Data-aware Neural Architecture Search for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00390/) (2024)
- [GLINT-RU: Gated Lightweight Intelligent Recurrent Units for Sequential Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10244/) (2024)
- [Efficient Sparse Attention needs Adaptive Token Release](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02328/) (2024)
- [SampleLLM: Optimizing Tabular Data Synthesis in Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16125/) (2025)
- [Retentive Decision Transformer with Adaptive Masking for Reinforcement Learning based Recommendation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17634/) (2024)
- [RePlay: a Recommendation Framework for Experimentation and Production Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07272/) (2024)
- [Multi-task Offline Reinforcement Learning for Online Advertising in Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23090/) (2025)
- [Save, Revisit, Retain: A Scalable Framework for Enhancing User Retention in Large-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18013/) (2025)
- [Energy-Guided Diffusion Sampling for Long-Term User Behavior Prediction in Reinforcement Learning-based Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12815/) (2025)
- [Long-term User Engagement Optimization through Model-agnostic Downstream Rewards Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14192/) (2026)
- [Research on Short-Video Platform User Decision-Making via Multimodal Temporal Modeling and Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12269/) (2025)
- [CALMRec: Causally Aligned Language Memory for Long-Horizon Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23647/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Improving user retention with reinforcement learning~(RL) has attracted increasing attention due to its significant importance in boosting user engagement. However, training the RL policy from scratch without hurting users' experience is unavoidable due to the requirement of trial-and-error searches. Furthermore, the offline methods, which aim to optimize the policy without online interactions, suffer from the notorious stability problem in value estimation or unbounded variance in counterfactual policy evaluation. To this end, we propose optimizing user retention with Decision Transformer~(DT), which avoids the offline difficulty by translating the RL as an autoregressive problem. However, deploying the DT in recommendation is a non-trivial problem because of the following challenges: (1) deficiency in modeling the numerical reward value; (2) data discrepancy between the policy learning and recommendation generation; (3) unreliable offline performance evaluation. In this work, we, therefore, contribute a series of strategies for tackling the exposed issues. We first articulate an efficient reward prompt by weighted aggregation of meta embeddings for informative reward embedding. Then, we endow a weighted contrastive learning method to solve the discrepancy between training and inference. Furthermore, we design two robust offline metrics to measure user retention. Finally, the significant improvement in the benchmark datasets demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method.