This paper proposes a generative method to dynamically simulate users' short video watching journey for watch time prediction in short video recommendation. Unlike existing methods that rely on multimodal features for video content understanding, our method simulates users' sustained interest in watching short videos by learning collaborative information, using interest changes from existing positive and negative feedback videos and user interaction behaviors to implicitly model users' video watching journey. By segmenting videos based on duration and adopting a Transformer-like architecture, our method can capture sequential dependencies between segments while mitigating duration bias. Extensive experiments on industrial-scale and public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on watch time prediction tasks. The method has been deployed on Kuaishou Lite, achieving a significant improvement of +0.13\% in APP duration, and reaching an XAUC of 83\% for single video watch time prediction on industrial-scale streaming training sets, far exceeding other methods. The proposed method provides a scalable and effective solution for video recommendation through segment-level modeling and user engagement feedback.

Watch time prediction (WTP) has emerged as a pivotal task in short video recommendation systems, designed to encapsulate user interests. Predicting users' watch times on videos often encounters challenges, including wide value ranges and imbalanced data distributions, which can lead to significant bias when directly regressing watch time. Recent studies have tried to tackle these issues by converting the continuous watch time estimation into an ordinal classification task. While these methods are somewhat effective, they exhibit notable limitations. Inspired by language modeling, we propose a novel Generative Regression (GR) paradigm for WTP based on sequence generation. This approach employs structural discretization to enable the lossless reconstruction of original values while maintaining prediction fidelity. By formulating the prediction problem as a numerical-to-sequence mapping, and with meticulously designed vocabulary and label encodings, each watch time is transformed into a sequence of tokens. To expedite model training, we introduce the curriculum learning with an embedding mixup strategy which can mitigate training-and-inference inconsistency associated with teacher forcing. We evaluate our method against state-of-the-art approaches on four public datasets and one industrial dataset. We also perform online A/B testing on Kuaishou, a leading video app with about 400 million DAUs, to demonstrate the real-world efficacy of our method. The results conclusively show that GR outperforms existing techniques significantly. Furthermore, we successfully apply GR to another regression task in recommendation systems, i.e., Lifetime Value (LTV) prediction, which highlights its potential as a novel and effective solution to general regression challenges.