The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence)

Reinforcement Learning for Personalization at Spotify with Tony Jebara - #609

Dec 29, 2022

Tony Jebara, VP of Engineering and Head of Machine Learning at Spotify, shares insights on how the platform evolves its personalization strategies through reinforcement learning. He explains the balance between immediate rewards and long-term user engagement, emphasizing the importance of Lifetime Value (LTV) in enhancing subscription retention. Jebara discusses innovative approaches in user behavior modeling, using coin and dice analogies to illustrate preferences. Learn how Spotify is transforming recommendations to create a richer user experience!

41:27

Creator website

Episode guests

Tony Jebara

Highlights

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Spotify Uses Reinforcement Learning For Their Recommenders To Build Sticky User Habits

01:38

How Machine Learning Has Evolved at Spotify

02:02

Modeling User Lifetime Value and Survival on Spotify

01:41

Intro

2min

Navigating Machine Learning at Spotify

14min

Understanding User Engagement and Lifetime Value

6min

Navigating Proxy Metrics in Business Machine Learning

2min

Exploring Multistate Survival and Reinforcement Learning in User Retention

3min

Modeling User Behavior with Coin and Dice Analogies

2min

Reinforcement Learning for Long-Term User Engagement

12min

Today we continue our NeurIPS 2022 series joined by Tony Jebara, VP of engineering and head of machine learning at Spotify. In our conversation with Tony, we discuss his role at Spotify and how the company’s use of machine learning has evolved over the last few years, and the business value of machine learning, specifically recommendations, hold at the company.

We dig into his talk on the intersection of reinforcement learning and lifetime value (LTV) at Spotify, which explores the application of Offline RL for user experience personalization. We discuss the various papers presented in the talk, and how they all map toward determining and increasing a user’s LTV.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/609.

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