INTENT: Out-of-Sample, Out-of-Time, and Cold-Start Evaluation on User Event Sequences

arXiv:2611.13069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Banks now train foundation models on ordered sequences of customer events such as transactions, app sessions, and authorizations. Deployed, such a model predicts forward in time, often for customers and merchants absent from training, yet each is evaluated on private data, so no two can be compared. Public benchmarks for such sequences rarely test a period the model has not seen; recommendation studies usually hold out each user's last events instead. We present INTENT (INTEraction, Novelty, and Transfer evaluation for next-action prediction), a public benchmark that scores a model in seven cells defined by whether the user, the period, and the target item appeared in training.