Paper ID: 2302.10043

Friend Ranking in Online Games via Pre-training Edge Transformers

Liang Yao, Jiazhen Peng, Shenggong Ji, Qiang Liu, Hongyun Cai, Feng He, Xu Cheng

Friend recall is an important way to improve Daily Active Users (DAU) in online games. The problem is to generate a proper lost friend ranking list essentially. Traditional friend recall methods focus on rules like friend intimacy or training a classifier for predicting lost players' return probability, but ignore feature information of (active) players and historical friend recall events. In this work, we treat friend recall as a link prediction problem and explore several link prediction methods which can use features of both active and lost players, as well as historical events. Furthermore, we propose a novel Edge Transformer model and pre-train the model via masked auto-encoders. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in the offline experiments and online A/B Tests of three Tencent games.

Submitted: Feb 20, 2023