English

A Self-Triggered Agentic Push Recommendation System

Information Retrieval 2026-08-03 v1

Abstract

Push notification is a critical recommendation scenario on large-scale platforms, allowing the system to proactively reach users outside the application to improve long-term re-engagement. However, designing an optimal push system requires handling a complex action space for the "whether and when" delivery problem under strict system resource constraints. Existing solutions typically fall into two passive paradigms: pre-planned frequency methods that allocate delivery times via offline modeling, limiting real-time adaptability; and fixed-interval triggering methods that periodically poll the system, creating a strict dilemma between excessive computational overhead and diminished optimal timing capture. Furthermore, such multi-stage frameworks severely suffer from local optima. To overcome these limitations, in this paper, we propose STEPS, a proactive, Self-Triggered End-to-end Agentic Push Recommendation System, which is already fully deployed at Douyin with over 1 billion users. STEPS reformulates push recommendation as a self-triggered agentic process in which the system decides not only whether to send a push, but also when to invoke itself again, thereby forming a closed loop that balances real-time effectiveness and efficiency. Specifically, STEPS consists of two decision transformer-based agents: a planning agent that schedules the next system invocation using a gated ordinal regression method, and an execution agent that decides whether to send a push based on trajectory rewards. Furthermore, we introduce a lightweight filtering agent to both control computational overhead and act as a crucial safeguard against unreasonable planning behaviors. Online A/B testing demonstrates that STEPS significantly increases user active days by 0.2843% and reduces the push permission disablement rate by 1.9089%, while the filtering agent reduces computational overhead by 79.42%.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.01949,
  title  = {A Self-Triggered Agentic Push Recommendation System},
  author = {Zhao-Yu Zhang and Qingying Chen and Chunyuan Zheng and Jing Zhou and Jian Sun and Siqi Chen and Leiying Chen and Chuan Zhou and Huiyou Jiang and Xin Tao and Haoxuan Li and Zhouchen Lin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.01949},
  year   = {2026}
}