FlowTime: Towards Continuous Generative Watch Time Prediction via Flow-based Personalized Priors

Abstract

Watch time has emerged as a pivotal metric for optimizing deep user engagement in short-video recommender systems. However, current methods of watch time prediction (WTP) suffer from inherent paradigm-specific limitations. Direct Regression faces mean-collapse due to unimodal Gaussian assumptions, while Ordinal Regression is hampered by quantization errors from rigid discretization. Similarly, Discrete Generative Regression struggles with high inference latency and heuristic vocabulary design. Beyond these specific flaws, a shared deficiency is the inability to capture the intrinsic multimodality and heterogeneity of User-Item Interaction Patterns. To address these challenges, we first revisit the WTP problem from a causal perspective and identify these user-specific patterns as structural confounders that modulate watch time outcomes, where identical interests manifest as distinct watch time outcomes conditioned on diverse user habits. Then, we formally propose a new (or the fourth) paradigm -- Continuous Generative Regression, and introduce FlowTime, a novel method utilizing a One-step Generative Variational Autoencoder. FlowTime effectively circumvents the latency of iterative denoising while maintaining the expressivity of continuous latent spaces. Furthermore, we design a Flow-based Personalized Prior that leverages NFs to warp a standard Gaussian prior into a complex, history-conditioned manifold, thereby enabling the adaptive modeling of multimodal interaction patterns. Finally, we build TimeRec, the first open-source WTP Library, alongside a novel personalization metric to establish a rigorous benchmarking standard. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B tests demonstrate FlowTime's significant superiority over SOTA methods.