Multi-Task Learning for User Engagement and Adoption in Live Video Streaming Events

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-task deep reinforcement learning model to optimize the scheduling of live video streaming events, aiming to simultaneously maximize viewer engagement and adoption across diverse real-world datasets.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel multi-task deep reinforcement learning approach with a Transformer-based architecture to balance engagement and adoption in live streaming event scheduling.

Findings

The model outperforms several state-of-the-art strategies.

Effective in real-world enterprise datasets.

Demonstrates significant improvements in viewer engagement and adoption.

Abstract

Nowadays, live video streaming events have become a mainstay in viewer's communication in large international enterprises. Provided that viewers are distributed worldwide, the main challenge resides on how to schedule the optimal event's time so as to improve both the viewer's engagement and adoption. In this paper we present a multi-task deep reinforcement learning model to select the time of a live video streaming event, aiming to optimize the viewer's engagement and adoption at the same time. We consider the engagement and adoption of the viewers as independent tasks and formulate a unified loss function to learn a common policy. In addition, we account for the fact that each task might have different contribution to the training strategy of the agent. Therefore, to determine the contribution of each task to the agent's training, we design a Transformer's architecture for the state-action transitions of each task. We evaluate our proposed model on four real-world datasets, generated by the live video streaming events of four large enterprises spanning from January 2019 until March 2021. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model when compared with several state-of-the-art strategies. For reproduction purposes, our evaluation datasets and implementation are publicly available at https://github.com/stefanosantaris/merlin.