DADF: A Distribution-Aware Debiasing Framework for Watch-Time Regression in Recommender Systems

Abstract

Watch-time predictors in short-video recommender systems can be approximately calibrated by their own scores while still overestimating short observations and underestimating long ones. We study whether this label-space mean shrinkage contains inference-time-predictable residual structure that can be corrected without replacing a mature first-stage model. We propose DADF, a distribution-aware second-stage framework that applies multiplicative correction to a frozen watch-time predictor. DADF stabilizes long-tailed correction targets with group-specific transformations, uses video duration to route specialized correction experts, and incorporates auxiliary engagement representations. Duration is used only to index heterogeneous residual distributions, not treated as the cause of the observed pattern. Experiments on KuaiRec and WeChat21 with seven first-stage backbones, together with a large-scale industrial ranking system, show that DADF reduces offline MAE by 4.33% and improves XAUC by 4.01% on average. In production, it reduces MAE by 12.57%. Three online A/B tests across full ranking, rough ranking, and degraded serving improve average time spent per device by 0.649%, 0.235%, and 0.199%, respectively, and all three integrations were subsequently deployed to 100% of traffic. These results show that DADF is a practical, model-agnostic plug-in for correcting predictable conditional residuals while preserving the serving interface of mature first-stage models. Code is available at https://github.com/liuzhao09/DADF.

11 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables