User retention is a key metric to measure long-term engagement in modern platforms. In real-time bidding (RTB) advertising system for user re-engagement, the retention model is required to predict future revisit probability at bidding time, before the user converts and consumes any content. Although post-conversion content, termed Onboarding Content, provides highly informative signals for retention prediction, directly using it in training causes severe feature leakage and creates a gap between training and serving. To address this issue, we propose OCARM, a two-stage distillation-aligned framework for Onboarding Content Augmented Retention Modeling, enabling the model to implicitly capture future content using only observable features during inference. In the first stage, we deliberately expose onboarding content to train a hierarchical encoder that produces teacher representations. In the second stage, a user encoder is aligned with the frozen teacher through distillation, allowing the model to approximate the inaccessible onboarding signals without leakage. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B tests demonstrate that our framework achieves consistent improvements in a real-world growth scenario.
@article{arxiv.2604.25839,
title = {Break the Inaccessible Boundary: Distilling Post-Conversion Content for User Retention Modeling},
author = {Tianbao Ma and Ruochen Yang and Chengen Li and Yuexin Shi and Jiangxia Cao and Linxun Chen and Zhaojie Liu and Yanan Niu and Han Li and Kun Gai},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.25839},
year = {2026}
}