# TIM: Temporal Interaction Model in Notification System

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07067 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07067/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Knowing your FATE: Friendship, Action and Temporal Explanations for User Engagement Prediction on Social Apps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06427/) (2020)
- [Characterizing and Forecasting User Engagement with In-app Action Graph: A Case Study of Snapchat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00355/) (2019)
- [I Know You'll Be Back: Interpretable New User Clustering and Churn Prediction on a Mobile Social Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01447/) (2019)
- [Offline Reinforcement Learning for Mobile Notifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03867/) (2022)
- [Multi-objective Optimization of Notifications Using Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03029/) (2022)
- [A State Transition Model for Mobile Notifications via Survival Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03099/) (2022)
- [DIGMN: Dynamic Intent Guided Meta Network for Differentiated User Engagement Forecasting in Online Professional Social Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12402/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Generative Sequential Notification Optimization via Multi-Objective Decision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02458/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern mobile applications heavily rely on the notification system to acquire daily active users and enhance user engagement. Being able to proactively reach users, the system has to decide when to send notifications to users. Although many researchers have studied optimizing the timing of sending notifications, they only utilized users' contextual features, without modeling users' behavior patterns. Additionally, these efforts only focus on individual notifications, and there is a lack of studies on optimizing the holistic timing of multiple notifications within a period. To bridge these gaps, we propose the Temporal Interaction Model (TIM), which models users' behavior patterns by estimating CTR in every time slot over a day in our short video application Kuaishou. TIM leverages long-term user historical interaction sequence features such as notification receipts, clicks, watch time and effective views, and employs a temporal attention unit (TAU) to extract user behavior patterns. Moreover, we provide an elegant strategy of holistic notifications send time control to improve user engagement while minimizing disruption. We evaluate the effectiveness of TIM through offline experiments and online A/B tests. The results indicate that TIM is a reliable tool for forecasting user behavior, leading to a remarkable enhancement in user engagement without causing undue disturbance.