Pulkit Agrawal

Hussain Jagirdar, Rukma Talwadker, Aditya Pareek et al.

Multi-variate Time Series (MTS) forecasting has made large strides (with very negligible errors) through recent advancements in neural networks, e.g., Transformers. However, in critical situations like predicting gaming overindulgence that affects one's mental well-being; an accurate forecast without a contributing evidence (explanation) is irrelevant. Hence, it becomes important that the forecasts are Interpretable - intermediate representation of the forecasted trajectory is comprehensible; as well as Explainable - attentive input features and events are accessible for a personalized and timely intervention of players at risk. While the contributing state of the art research on interpretability primarily focuses on temporally-smooth single-process driven time series data, our online multi-player gameplay data demonstrates intractable temporal randomness due to intrinsic orthogonality between player's game outcome and their intent to engage further. We introduce a novel deep Actionable Forecasting Network (AFN), which addresses the inter-dependent challenges associated with three exclusive objectives - 1) forecasting accuracy; 2) smooth comprehensible trajectory and 3) explanations via multi-dimensional input features while tackling the challenges introduced by our non-smooth temporal data, together in one single solution. AFN establishes a \it{new benchmark} via: (i) achieving 25% improvement on the MSE of the forecasts on player data in comparison to the SOM-VAE based SOTA networks; (ii) attributing unfavourable progression of a player's time series to a specific future time step(s), with the premise of eliminating near-future overindulgent player volume by over 18% with player specific actionable inputs feature(s) and (iii) proactively detecting over 23% (100% jump from SOTA) of the to-be overindulgent, players on an average, 4 weeks in advance.

Pulkit Agrawal, Rukma Talwadker, Aditya Pareek et al.

Recent advancements in state-of-the-art (SOTA) offline reinforcement learning (RL) have primarily focused on addressing function approximation errors, which contribute to the overestimation of Q-values for out-of-distribution actions, a challenge that static datasets exacerbate. However, high stakes applications such as recommendation systems in online gaming, introduce further complexities due to player's psychology (intent) driven by gameplay experiences and the inherent volatility on the platform. These factors create highly sparse, partially overlapping state spaces across policies, further influenced by the experiment path selection logic which biases state spaces towards specific policies. Current SOTA methods constrain learning from such offline data by clipping known counterfactual actions as out-of-distribution due to poor generalization across unobserved states. Further aggravating conservative Q-learning and necessitating more online exploration. FAST-Q introduces a novel approach that (1) leverages Gradient Reversal Learning to construct balanced state representations, regularizing the policy-specific bias between the player's state and action thereby enabling counterfactual estimation; (2) supports offline counterfactual exploration in parallel with static data exploitation; and (3) proposes a Q-value decomposition strategy for multi-objective optimization, facilitating explainable recommendations over short and long-term objectives. These innovations demonstrate superiority of FAST-Q over prior SOTA approaches and demonstrates at least 0.15 percent increase in player returns, 2 percent improvement in lifetime value (LTV), 0.4 percent enhancement in the recommendation driven engagement, 2 percent improvement in the player's platform dwell time and an impressive 10 percent reduction in the costs associated with the recommendation, on our volatile gaming platform.