Fake news detection has been a long-standing research focus in social networks. Recent studies suggest that incorporating sentiment information from both news content and user comments can enhance detection performance. However, existing approaches typically treat sentiment features as auxiliary signals, overlooking role differentiation, that is, the same sentiment polarity may originate from users with distinct roles, thereby limiting their ability to capture nuanced patterns for effective detection. To address this issue, we propose SARC, a Sentiment-Augmented Role Clustering framework which utilizes sentiment-enhanced deep clustering to identify user roles for improved fake news detection. The framework first generates user features through joint comment text representation (with BiGRU and Attention mechanism) and sentiment encoding. It then constructs a differentiable deep clustering module to automatically categorize user roles. Finally, unlike existing approaches which take fake news label as the unique supervision signal, we propose a joint optimization objective integrating role clustering and fake news detection to further improve the model performance. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets, RumourEval-19 and Weibo-comp, demonstrate that SARC achieves superior performance across all metrics compared to baseline models. The code is available at: https://github.com/jxshang/SARC.

Signed Graph Neural Networks (SGNNs) have achieved outstanding performance in Link Sign Prediction (LSP), which involves predicting the existence and polarity of edges, by effectively modeling positive and negative interactions in signed graphs. However, their black-box nature raises transparency concerns, necessitating faithful explanations of model behavior to ensure trustworthiness and accountability. Existing eXplainable GNN (XGNN) methods, primarily designed for unsigned graphs, struggle to provide meaningful and human-understandable explanations for SGNN-based LSP, often generating disconnected subgraph explanations or neglecting the unique sign interactions. To address the gap, we propose SGExplainer, a novel method that leverages balanced paths, a concept rooted in signed graph theory, to provide clear and faithful explanations for LSP. SGExplainer employs a path-enforcing mask learning framework that ensures interpretable balanced path generation while maintaining explanation fidelity. Extensive experiments on real-world signed graphs demonstrate that SGExplainer consistently provides faithful and intuitive explanations for various SGNNs, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in explanation quality, interpretability, and efficiency.

Graph-structured data effectively captures complex relationships in diverse domains such as social networks, financial transactions, citation networks, and recommendation systems. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel in learning intricate topological patterns, yielding strong performance on tasks like node classification and link prediction. However, real-world graphs often scale to millions of nodes and billions of directed edges, posing significant computational and storage challenges for GNN training that frequently exceed available hardware limits. Although graph sampling and distillation techniques alleviate these issues by subsampling or creating surrogate graphs, they primarily handle undirected graphs, neglecting directional semantics that are crucial for applications like fraud detection and causal analysis. To address these limitations, we introduce the Directed Graph Distillation (Dir-GD) framework, which combines distributed learning with community detection to divide large directed graphs into independent subgraphs for distributed directed GNN training. This process culminates in parameter aggregation to produce a compact global synthetic graph that preserves essential topology and directionality. Extensive experiments on large-scale datasets, such as the million-node soc-pokec-relationships, demonstrate over 91% accuracy at 0.001 distillation ratios, accompanied by substantial memory and runtime savings. This work pioneers directed graph distillation as a key paradigm for analyzing ultra-large directed graphs, offering a scalable solution that maintains high fidelity in compressed representations.

Quasi-clique is one of the most fundamental models for characterizing cohesive subgraphs in network analysis. However, existing quasi-clique definitions and identification algorithms are designed for unsigned graphs, while many real-world networks are modeled as signed graphs with positive and negative edges representing cooperative and adversarial interactions between entities. Therefore, it remains an open problem to define a quasi-clique model tailored for signed graphs. Motivated by this, we propose the maximal balanced \( (\gamma_{1},\gamma_{2}) \) -quasi-clique (MBQC) model, which not only preserves the essence of quasi-completeness but also aligns with the foremost structural balance theory for signed graphs. Specifically, we formulate the problem of MBQCs enumeration in a given signed graph and prove its NP-hardness. To address this problem, we devise a novel branch-and-bound algorithm to efficiently enumerate all MBQCs in a signed graph, which is further optimized with several carefully-crafted techniques to prune unpromising search spaces and enhance enumeration efficiency. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the efficiency, scalability, and effectiveness of our MBQC model and algorithms.

Fake news detection is a hot topic in the social media mining research community. Recent studies have shown that sentiment signals could significantly benefit the detection performance. However, most existing methods treat sentiment merely as auxiliary features, while the more sophisticated social sentiment interactions were rarely explored. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named ReFEND, which leverages the sentiment resonances among the social users (i.e., social sentiment resonances) and the sentiment relationship between news content and user comments to improve the detection performance. Specifically, we first utilize sentiment scorers to assess the sentiment of comments and identify users' emotional tendencies. Then we creatively construct a sentiment-aware multi-relational graph to capture social sentiment resonances evoked by the content and the interactions between comments and news. Next, we leverage the relational graph convolutional network (RGCN), which specializes in handling multi-relational graph data, to learn the interactions on sentiment-aware graph. To our best knowledge, this is the first effort to leverage social sentiment resonances for fake news detection. Experimental results on three datasets indicate that ReFEND significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art sentiment-based methods in terms of F1 and accuracy. Besides, ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of components designed in ReFEND.

Predicting information popularity in social networks has become a central focus of network analysis. While recent advancements have been made, most existing approaches rely solely on the final cascade size as the primary supervision signal for model optimization. This narrow focus limits the model generalization ability, particularly when faced with highly heterogeneous cascades. Additionally, in real-world scenarios, obtaining detailed social relationships is challenging, complicating effective structural feature learning. To address these issues, this paper proposes a semi-supervised model called Dual Variational Cascade AutoEncoders (DVCAE), which leverages parallel structural and temporal variational autoencoders for enhanced feature learning and popularity prediction. The model first aggregates multiple cascades into a global interaction graph, enabling structural information sharing across cascades. Then, it applies sparse matrix factorization-based graph embedding and graph filtering techniques on global and local cascade graphs respectively, generating initial node embeddings that are insensitive to topological perturbations. After that, two parallel variational autoencoders are designed to generate hidden representations for structural and temporal features respectively, with two self-supervised reconstruction losses integrated into the prediction loss to enrich supervision signals. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that DVCAE outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of prediction accuracy.

The increasing of group polarization on social media seriously impacts on the health of public discourse and information dissemination. At present, detecting polarized structures in signed networks is well-motivated for studying the group polarization on social media. However, most studies restricted the number of polarized structures to only two, while neglecting the real-world scenario where signed networks consist of multiple polarized structures, that is an unreasonable assumption. To conquer the limitations of the existing work, in this paper, we present a novel cohesive subgraph model based on structural clusterable theory, named maximal multipolarized clique (MMC), which can be partitioned into k polarized subcliques such that the edges in subcliques are positive and the edges between subcliques are negative. This paper formulates the problem of Maximal Multipolarized Cliques Search (MMCS) in signed networks which is proved to be NP-hard. To address this problem, we first devise powerful pruning rules to reduce the signed network significantly and further develop an efficient algorithm to search all maximal multipolarized cliques in the reduced signed network. The experimental results on real-world signed networks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithm.