This paper advances research on social networks, extended reality, and the metaverse by bringing together innovations from two different communities – AI and cognitive science – to develop LLM-based agents with not only fluent responses but also realistic opinion dynamics that capture a variety of human biases, imperfections, and general departures from rationality. This avenue of investigation can empower applications from social simulation of human opinions in geopolitical hotspots to realistic non-player character interactions in metaverse games. Recent advances in AI have made remarkable progress toward general intelligence with the introduction of large language models (LLMs). They also enabled grounding LLM responses in specialized information stored externally using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In a separate line of research, studies on human cognition have produced cognitive architectures that emulate human departures from rationality, such as biases and imperfections, which are crucial to understanding a wide range of social phenomena and human preferences. A critical mechanism in cognitive architectures is the modulation of retrieval weights from (human) memory; we are biased in what we remember. Combining RAG with cognitive model-inspired computation of information retrieval weights, we develop the Irrational LLM – one that weighs information retrieval in RAG systems according to cognitive models, thereby accurately emulating human opinion formation. We implement the novel human cognition-inspired RAG framework (CogRAG) and use it to emulate option developments on different sides of a conflict regarding debated issues. Responses generated by CogRAG (on posts withheld from training data) show close correspondence with real responses posted on social media, suggesting the viability of this approach in approximating biased human opinions. We hope this study paves the way to new directions in AI, social networks, metaverse computing, and human-in-the-loop modeling that better represent diverse human opinions in geopolitical, entertainment, and socio-technical contexts.

This paper addresses the problem of optimizing the allocation of labeling resources to enhance the performance of semi-supervised belief representation learning in social networks. The objective is to strategically identify valuable nodes in social media graphs that are worth labeling within a constrained budget to maximize downstream learning task performance. Despite progress in unsupervised and semi-supervised methods for belief and ideology representation learning on social networks, the scarcity of high-quality labeled social data continues to pose a significant challenge. Therefore, allocating labeling efforts judiciously becomes critical in scenarios with limited resources for labeling. This paper introduces a perturbation-based active learning strategy inspired by graph augmentation, PerbALGraph, which progressively selects nodes for labeling using an automatic estimator, thereby eliminating the need for human guidance. This estimator is based on the principle that nodes in the network that exhibit heightened sensitivity to changes in structural features are better candidates for labeling. We design the estimator to be model-agnostic and application-independent and to score candidates under a set of designed graph perturbations. Extensive experiments on six real-world social media datasets demonstrate the superior performance and robustness of our proposed method compared to existing active learning approaches.

The perceptions and decisions of individuals on social networks are deeply rooted in their intrinsic beliefs, which makes it possible to infer social beliefs from user behavior and message interactions. While existing research models these interactions as graphs and learns their representations, interpretability remains a significant challenge. In real-world scenarios, the interpretation of beliefs is nested within subject scopes of different granularity (such as topics and locations), posing additional challenges for belief discovery. In this paper, we introduce the Interpretable Graph Auto-Encoder Tree (IGAT), a novel end-to-end framework that jointly encodes hierarchical subject scopes and corresponding beliefs as a unified, interpretable hierarchical representation. IGAT integrates the interpretable hierarchy of Model Trees with disentangled representation learning models. We propose a differentiable Slice Mechanism to dynamically optimize internal node splitting and jointly train a leaf model to learn disentangled belief subspaces. The aggregation of these subspaces yields a unified representation, offering interpretations for both subjects and beliefs. Experimental evaluations on three real-world Twitter datasets show that IGAT achieves a consistent improvement of 1.49%-5.61% in F1-score, accuracy, and purity in the belief discovery task, as well as its effectiveness in various downstream analytical applications.

This paper introduces SCRAG, a prediction frame-work inspired by social computing, designed to forecast community responses to real or hypothetical social media posts. SCRAG can be used by public relations specialists (e.g., to craft messaging in ways that avoid unintended misinterpretations) or public figures and influencers (e.g., to anticipate social responses), among other applications related to public sentiment prediction, crisis management, and social what-if analysis. While large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in generating coherent and contextually rich text, their reliance on static training data and susceptibility to hallucinations limit their effectiveness at response forecasting in dynamic social media environments. SCRAG overcomes these challenges by integrating LLMs with a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technique rooted in social computing. Specifically, our framework retrieves (i) historical responses from the target community to capture their ideological, semantic, and emotional makeup, and (ii) external knowledge from sources such as news articles to inject time-sensitive context. This information is then jointly used to forecast the responses of the target community to new posts or narratives. Extensive experiments across six scenarios on the X platform (formerly Twitter), tested with various embedding models and LLMs, demonstrate over 10% improvements on average in key evaluation metrics. A concrete example further shows its effectiveness in capturing diverse ideologies and nuances. Our work provides a social computing tool for applications where accurate and concrete insights into community responses are crucial.

The paper advances belief representation learning in polarized networks – the mapping of social beliefs espoused by users and posts in a polarized network into a disentangled latent space that separates (the members and beliefs of) each side. Our prior work embeds social interaction data, using non-negative variational graph auto-encoders, into a disentangled latent space. However, the interaction graphs alone may not adequately reflect similarity and/or disparity in beliefs, especially for those graphs with sparsity and outlier issues. In this paper, we investigate the impact of limited guidance from Large Language Models (LLMs) on the accuracy of belief separation. Specifically, we integrate social graphs with LLM-based soft labels as a novel weakly-supervised interpretable graph representation learning framework. This framework combines the strengths of graph-and text-based information, and is shown to maintain the interpretability of learned representations, where different axes in the latent space denote association with different sides of the divide. An evaluation on six real-world Twitter datasets illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed model at solving stance detection problems, demonstrating 5.9%-6.5% improvements in the accuracy, F1 score, and purity metrics, without introducing a significant computational overhead. An ablation study is also discussed to study the impact of different components of the proposed architecture.

This article investigates the cost function learning in social information networks, wherein human memory and cognitive bias are explicitly taken into account. We first propose a model for social information-diffusion dynamics, with a focus on the systematic modeling of asymmetric cognitive bias represented by confirmation bias and novelty bias. Building on the dynamics model, we then propose the M3IRL—a memorized model and maximum-entropy-based inverse reinforcement learning—for learning cost functions. Compared with the existing model-free IRLs, the characteristics of M3IRL are significantly different here: no dependence on the Markov decision process principle, the need for only a single finite-time trajectory sample, and bounded decision variables. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed social information-diffusion model and the M3IRL algorithm is validated by the online social media data.

Automatic response forecasting for news media plays a crucial role in enabling content producers to efficiently predict the impact of news releases and prevent unexpected negative outcomes such as social conflict and moral injury. To effectively forecast responses, it is essential to develop measures that leverage the social dynamics and contextual information surrounding individuals, especially in cases where explicit profiles or historical actions of the users are limited (referred to as lurkers). As shown in a previous study, 97% of all tweets are produced by only the most active 25% of users. However, existing approaches have limited exploration of how to best process and utilize these important features. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework, named SOCIALSENSE, that leverages a large language model to induce a belief-centered graph on top of an existent social network, along with graph-based propagation to capture social dynamics. We hypothesize that the induced graph that bridges the gap between distant users who share similar beliefs allows the model to effectively capture the response patterns. Our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art in experimental evaluations for both zero-shot and supervised settings, demonstrating its effectiveness in response forecasting. Moreover, the analysis reveals the framework's capability to effectively handle unseen user and lurker scenarios, further highlighting its robustness and practical applicability.

Network embedding plays a significant role in a variety of applications. To capture the topology of the network, most of the existing network embedding algorithms follow a sampling training procedure, which maximizes the similarity (e.g., embedding vectors' dot product) between positively sampled node pairs and minimizes the similarity between negatively sampled node pairs in the embedding space. Typically, close node pairs function as positive samples while distant node pairs are usually considered as negative samples. However, under different or even competing sampling strategies, some methods champion sampling distant node pairs as positive samples to encapsulate longer distance information in link prediction, whereas others advocate adding close nodes into the negative sample set to boost the performance of node recommendation. In this paper, we seek to understand the intrinsic relationships between these competing strategies. To this end, we identify two properties (discrimination and monotonicity) that given any node pair proximity distribution, node embeddings should embrace. Moreover, we quantify the empirical error of the trained similarity score w.r.t. the sampling strategy, which leads to an important finding that the discrimination property and the monotonicity property for all node pairs can not be satisfied simultaneously in real-world applications. Guided by such analysis, a simple yet novel model (SENSEI) is proposed, which seamlessly fulfills the discrimination property and the partial monotonicity within the top-$K$ ranking list. Extensive experiments show that SENSEI outperforms the state-of-the-arts in plain network embedding.

Multi-layered inter-dependent networks have emerged in a wealth of high-impact application domains. Cross-layer dependency inference, which aims to predict the dependencies between nodes across different layers, plays a pivotal role in such multi-layered network systems. Most, if not all, of existing methods exclusively follow a coupling principle of design and can be categorized into the following two groups, including (1) heterogeneous network embedding based methods (data coupling), and (2) collaborative filtering based methods (module coupling). Despite the favorable achievement, methods of both types are faced with two intricate challenges, including (1) the sparsity challenge where very limited observations of cross-layer dependencies are available, resulting in a deteriorated prediction of missing dependencies, and (2) the dynamic challenge given that the multi-layered network system is constantly evolving over time.

In this paper, we investigate a realistic but underexplored problem, called few-shot temporal knowledge graph reasoning, that aims to predict future facts for newly emerging entities based on extremely limited observations in evolving graphs. It offers practical value in applications that need to derive instant new knowledge about new entities in temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) with minimal supervision. The challenges mainly come from the few-shot and time shift properties of new entities. First, the limited observations associated with them are insufficient for training a model from scratch. Second, the potentially dynamic distributions from the initially observable facts to the future facts ask for explicitly modeling the evolving characteristics of new entities. We correspondingly propose a novel Meta Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (MetaTKGR) framework. Unlike prior work that relies on rigid neighborhood aggregation schemes to enhance low-data entity representation, MetaTKGR dynamically adjusts the strategies of sampling and aggregating neighbors from recent facts for new entities, through temporally supervised signals on future facts as instant feedback. Besides, such a meta temporal reasoning procedure goes beyond existing meta-learning paradigms on static knowledge graphs that fail to handle temporal adaptation with large entity variance. We further provide a theoretical analysis and propose a temporal adaptation regularizer to stabilize the meta temporal reasoning over time. Empirically, extensive experiments on three real-world TKGs demonstrate the superiority of MetaTKGR over eight state-of-the-art baselines by a large margin.

This paper develops a novel unsupervised algorithm for belief representation learning in polarized networks that (i) uncovers the latent dimensions of the underlying belief space and (ii) jointly embeds users and content items (that they interact with) into that space in a manner that facilitates a number of downstream tasks, such as stance detection, stance prediction, and ideology mapping. Inspired by total correlation in information theory, we propose the Information-Theoretic Variational Graph Auto-Encoder (InfoVGAE) that learns to project both users and content items (e.g., posts that represent user views) into an appropriate disentangled latent space. To better disentangle latent variables in that space, we develop a total correlation regularization module, a Proportional-Integral (PI) control module, and adopt rectified Gaussian distribution to ensure the orthogonality. The latent representation of users and content can then be used to quantify their ideological leaning and detect/predict their stances on issues. We evaluate the performance of the proposed InfoVGAE on three real-world datasets, of which two are collected from Twitter and one from U.S. Congress voting records. The evaluation results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised models by reducing 10.5% user clustering errors and achieving 12.1% higher F1 scores for stance separation of content items. In addition, InfoVGAE produces a comparable result with supervised models. We also discuss its performance on stance prediction and user ranking within ideological groups.

Topic popularity prediction is an important task on social media, which aims at predicting the ongoing trends of topics according to logged historical text-based records. However, only limited existing approaches apply sentiment analysis to facilitate popularity prediction. Public sentiment is worth taking into consideration because the topics with strong sentiment tend to spread faster and broader on social media. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, SENTI2POP, to predict topic popularity utilizing sentiment information. We first adapt a state-of-art popularity quantification method to capture the topic popularity, and then design a novel tree-like network (Tree-Net) combining Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for sentiment analysis. In addition, we propose a sentiment-aware time series prediction approach based on Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average model (ARIMA) to predict topic popularity. We prove by experiments that SENTI2POP outperforms the existing popularity prediction models on a real-world Twitter dataset by reducing the prediction error. Experimental results also show that SENTI2POP could be applied to improve the accuracy of most non-sentiment popularity prediction models.

We propose the Dual Scribble-to-Painting Network (DSP-Net), which is able to produce artistic paintings based on user-generated scribbles. In scribble-to-painting transformation, a neural net has to infer additional details of the image, given relatively sparse information contained in the outlines of the scribble. Therefore, it is more challenging than classical image style transfer, in which the information content is reduced from photos to paintings. Inspired by the human cognitive process, we propose a multi-task generative adversarial network, which consists of two jointly trained neural nets -- one for generating artistic images and the other one for semantic segmentation. We demonstrate that joint training on these two tasks brings in additional benefit. Experimental result shows that DSP-Net outperforms state-of-the-art models both visually and quantitatively. In addition, we publish a large dataset for scribble-to-painting transformation.