Weight Averaging (WA) has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing generalization by promoting convergence to a flat loss landscape, which correlates with stronger out-of-distribution performance. However, applying WA directly to multi-modal domain generalization (MMDG) is challenging: differences in optimization speed across modalities lead WA to overfit to faster-converging ones in early stages, suppressing the contribution of slower yet complementary modalities, thereby hindering effective modality fusion and skewing the loss surface toward sharper, less generalizable minima. To address this issue, we propose MBCD, a unified collaborative distillation framework that retains WA's flatness-inducing advantages while overcoming its shortcomings in multi-modal contexts. MBCD begins with adaptive modality dropout in the student model to curb early-stage bias toward dominant modalities. A gradient consistency constraint then aligns learning signals between uni-modal branches and the fused representation, encouraging coordinated and smoother optimization. Finally, a WA-based teacher conducts cross-modal distillation by transferring fused knowledge to each uni-modal branch, which strengthens cross-modal interactions and steer convergence toward flatter solutions. Extensive experiments on MMDG benchmarks show that MBCD consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving superior accuracy and robustness across diverse unseen domains.

Temporal knowledge graph reasoning (TKGR) excels at inferring missing event‐centric facts within a timeline, thereby mitigating the inherent incompleteness of real‐world data. Existing TKGR methods predominantly exploit intrasnapshot structural patterns and intersnapshot temporal dependencies. However, they often fail to incorporate valuable time‐invariant factual knowledge about events and struggle to jointly model entity–relation evolution dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose CKE 3 , a novel contrastive knowledge‐enhanced event evolution model that integrates time‐invariant entity background knowledge with time‐variant structural information for enhanced reasoning. Specifically, CKE 3 improves the learning of expressive entity and relation representations through an adaptive knowledge retrieval strategy, which constructs descriptive common sense knowledge associated with each entity to provide richer contextual information. Moreover, we introduce a knowledge‐aware hierarchical structural–temporal modeling module that jointly captures entity–relation structural interactions as well as sequential and periodic temporal patterns across knowledge graph snapshots. To further mitigate the impact of knowledge noise, we design a self‐supervised augmentation task that promotes the fusion of relevant information while alleviating noise. Extensive experiments on four public TKGR datasets demonstrate that CKE 3 consistently surpasses state‐of‐the‐art baselines, highlighting its effectiveness in accurate entity forecasting for the TKGR task.

Micro-video popularity prediction (MVPP) plays a crucial role in various downstream applications. Recently, multimodal methods that integrate multiple modalities to predict the popularity have exhibited impressive performance. However, these methods face several unresolved issues: (1) limited contextual information and (2) incomplete modal semantics. Incorporating relevant videos and performing full fine-tuning on pre-trained models typically achieves powerful capabilities in addressing these issues. However, this paradigm is not optimal due to its weak transferability and scarce downstream data. Inspired by prompt learning, we propose ICPF, a novel In-Context Prompt-augmented Framework to enhance popularity prediction. ICPF maintains a model-agnostic design, facilitating seamless integration with various multimodal fusion models. Specifically, the multi-branch retriever first retrieves similar modal content through within-modality similarities. Next, in-context prompt generator extracts semantic prior features from retrieved videos and generates in-context prompts, enriching pre-trained models with valuable contextual knowledge. Finally, knowledge-augmented predictor captures complementary features including modal semantics and popularity information. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of ICPF compared to 14 competitive baselines.

Multimodal learning with incomplete modality is practical and challenging. Recently, researchers have focused on enhancing the robustness of pre-trained MultiModal Transformers (MMTs) under missing modality conditions by applying learnable prompts. However, these prompt-based methods face several limitations: (1) incomplete modalities provide restricted modal cues for task-specific inference, (2) dummy imputation for missing content causes information loss and introduces noise, and (3) static prompts are instance-agnostic, offering limited knowledge for instances with various missing conditions. To address these issues, we propose RAGPT, a novel Retrieval-AuGmented dynamic Prompt Tuning framework. RAGPT comprises three modules: (I) the multi-channel retriever, which identifies similar instances through a within-modality retrieval strategy, (II) the missing modality generator, which recovers missing information using retrieved contexts, and (III) the context-aware prompter, which captures contextual knowledge from relevant instances and generates dynamic prompts to largely enhance the MMT’s robustness. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets show that RAGPT consistently outperforms all competitive baselines in handling incomplete modality problems.

Predicting user engagement on social media platforms is increasingly vital for applications such as recommendations, Internet marketing, and content moderation. Existing methods face challenges in effectively capturing contextual information and ensuring relevance, often leading to the retrieval of semantically similar but contextually irrelevant UGCs. To address these challenges, we introduce DRUEP, a distilled retrieval-augmented framework that explores distilled multimodal representations through the information bottleneck technique to enhance UGC relevance retrieval, improving the quality of retrieved UGC for more accurate user engagement prediction. Our approach is able to effectively reduce redundant multi-modal noise, optimizes retrieval efficiency, and captures dynamic nature of UGC. Extensive experiments on multimodal large-scale datasets demonstrate that DRUEP significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Multi-modal knowledge graph (MMKG) completion aims to infer missing links in knowledge graphs by leveraging both structural information and multi-modal data, such as images and text. While existing methods focus on multi-modal feature fusion, they often fail to disentangle modality-specific and shared features, leading to redundant and suboptimal embeddings. Furthermore, implicit semantic correlations between entities are frequently overlooked. To address these issues, we propose INCADE, an Implicit Entity Community-Aware Disentangled Expert framework that jointly captures implicit high-order correlations among entities and disentangles modality-specific and shared representations. INCADE introduces an entity community-aware encoder to model implicit entity interactions and auxiliary tasks (e.g., modality memorization and unlearning) to enforce disentanglement. This advantage enables the model to easily utilizes both explicit and implicit multi-modal information. Extensive experiments on standard MMKG benchmarks demonstrate that INCADE achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming 14 baseline models. Code is available at https://github.com/shchli/INCADE.

Detecting fake news videos has emerged as a critical task due to their profound implications in politics, finance, and public health. However, existing methods often fail to distinguish real videos from their subtly manipulated counterparts, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this limitation, we propose REAL, a novel model-agnostic REtrieval-Augmented prototype-aLignment framework. REAL first introduces an LLM-driven video retriever to identify contextually relevant samples for a given target video. Subsequently, a dual-prototype aligner is carefully developed to model two distinct prototypes: one representing authentic patterns from retrieved real news videos and the other encapsulating manipulation-specific patterns from fake samples. By aligning the target video’s representations with its ground-truth prototype while distancing them from the opposing prototype, the aligner captures manipulation-aware representations capable of detecting even subtle video manipulations. Finally, these enriched representations are seamlessly integrated into existing detection models in a plug-and-play manner. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that REAL largely enhances the detection ability of existing methods. The code and data for reproducing the results are available at https://github.com/Jian-Lang/REAL.

Micro-video popularity prediction (MVPP) plays a crucial role in diverse real-world applications. While recent popularity prediction methods leveraging multimodal content have shown impressive performance, they face two unresolved challenges: (1) neglecting the presence of noise in micro-videos and (2) failing to address incomplete modalities. To tackle these issues, we propose FMOE, a novel Flexible Mixture of Modality Experts framework designed for robust MVPP. FMOE employs a two-stage learning strategy, consisting of pre-training and post-training phases. Specifically, during pre-training, FMOE extracts discriminative unimodal representations by training modality-specific experts. In the post-training phase, FMOE dynamically captures cross-modal correlations by mixing experts. Subsequently, FMOE quantifies uncertainty within micro-videos using an uncertainty-aware router, which maps modal representations into a Gaussian distribution space. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that FMOE significantly outperforms all competitive baselines by a large margin.

Micro-video popularity prediction (MVPP) plays a crucial role in numerous real-world applications, including product marketing and recommendation systems. While existing methodologies predominantly assume complete modalities during multimodal learning, this assumption often fails to hold in practical scenarios due to various constraints, such as privacy concerns or data integrity issues. To address this limitation, we propose SCRAG, a novel Self-Correlation Retrieval-Augmented Generative framework designed to enhance missing-modality robustness in MVPP. SCRAG operates in a retrieval-guided generation manner that explores relevant knowledge to enhance the reconstruction of missing content, which consists of two primary components: (1) a self-correlation retriever and (2) a multimodal mixture-of-experts generator. It first acquires instances pertinent to the missing content through multimodal prompt alignment. Subsequently, the generator extracts contextual modal information from the retrieved context-rich instances. By learning the joint distribution of modalities, SCRAG effectively recovers missing content and addresses the modal heterogeneity challenge inherent in cross-modal generation approaches. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that SCRAG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, underscoring its effectiveness in handling incomplete modalities and improving the accuracy of micro-video popularity prediction.

Zero-shot composed image retrieval (ZS-CIR) is a challenging task that aims to retrieve images similar to a composed query of a reference image and a description, without relying on training on triplet datasets. Existing methods for this task often rely on predefined, fixed retrieval processes that combine the image and the modified text through hand-crafted templates, which suffer from two main issues: non-adaptive retrieval queries and user-unfriendly retrieval processes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework - Automatic Multi-Agent Collaboration for Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (AutoCIR). AutoCIR consists of three training-free agents - a planner, a retriever, and a corrector - that work together to iteratively identify and rectify mismatches. The planner guides the retriever by generating a customized target caption for the composed query and further refines this caption to resolve any semantic discrepancies based on feedback. The corrector, equipped with a chain-of-thought reasoning mechanism, conducts an in-depth evaluation of the retrieved results and generates appropriate self-correction actions. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that AutoCIR consistently outperforms previous competitive methods for ZS-CIR.

Traditional multimodal learning approaches often assume that all modalities are available during both the training and inference phases. However, this assumption is often impractical in real-world scenarios due to challenges such as sensor failures, data corruption, or privacy concerns. While recent efforts focus on enhancing the robustness of pre-trained Multimodal Transformers (MTs) under missing modality conditions, mainstream work in this field often overlook reconstructing the missing modalities and rely on static, sample-agnostic prompt-tuning techniques, undermining their efficacy in severe modality missing scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose REDEEM, a novel REtrieval-guiDEd conditional gEnerative fraMework that largely alleviates the modality missing problems on pre-trained MTs. REDEEM consists of a new adaptive retrieval mechanism to identify relevant instances for both modality-complete and -incomplete samples. It then conditions on the remaining modalities and utilizes the retrieved data as experts to effectively recover the missing ones in modality-incomplete instances through a within-modal reconstruction manner. Finally, REDEEM generates sample-aware inter-modal prompts from the retrieved instances to guide MTs in tackling severe modality missing challenges. Comprehensive experiments on three diverse multimodal classification benchmarks demonstrate that REDEEM significantly outperforms competitive baselines.

Micro-video popularity prediction (MVPP) is a crucial research topic with important implications for social media marketing and stakeholders. Current works in MVPP utilized the pre-trained vision-language models (PVLs) to model the multimodal features for prediction, failing to capture the evolving popularity trend in micro-videos and leading to suboptimal results. To tackle this limitation, we propose EvoPro, an Evolution-aware Prompt-augmented framework that enhances MVPP. First, inspired by the powerful multimodal understanding and text generation skills of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), an LMM-driven generative retriever is proposed to create contextually rich retrieval queries and perform precise video-to-video retrieval, forming dynamic micro-video support sets that effectively reflect evolving patterns. Building upon this, a graph-based prompter generates evolutionary prompts by capturing the relational structures within the support set. These prompts, representing the latest trend dynamics, serve as few-shot examples to guide PVLs. By integrating evolutionary prompts, the PVLs are empowered to model the evolving popularity trends more accurately, yielding stronger and more predictive representations. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmarks demonstrate that EvoPro significantly outperforms competitive baselines.

The rapid spread of rumor content on online micro-video platforms poses significant threats to public health and safety. However, existing Micro-Video Rumor Detection (MVRD) methods are generally black-box, which lacks transparency and makes it difficult to understand the reasoning behind classification decisions. In this work, we introduce ExMRD, a novel Explainable Micro-video Rumor Detection framework designed to generate detailed and coherent explanations for enhancing MVRD. Inspired by the powerful reasoning capacity of Chain-of-Thought (CoT), we introduce a novel inference mechanism called R3CoT-- consisting of Refining, Retrieving, and Reasoning on MVRD. This mechanism enables Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to reorganize the original video content, retrieve domain knowledge related to rumors, and generate explainable conclusions regarding whether the micro-video contains rumor information. Instead of directly fine-tuning MLLMs for MVRD, which is computationally expensive, we propose a Small Language Reviewer (SLReviewer), which distills the outputs of R3CoT guided MLLMs to ensure efficient and reliable predictions. Extensive experiments on three real-world benchmarks demonstrate that ExMRD significantly outperforms competitive baselines while providing high-quality rationales.

Graph anomaly detection has gained significant research interest across various domains. Due to the lack of labeled data, contrastive learning has been applied in detecting anomalies and various contrastive strategies have been initiated. However, these methods might force two instances (e.g., node-level and subgraph-level representations) with different category labels to be consistent during model training, which can adversely impact the model robustness. Also, they extract node-level representations only based on node attributes, which are inadequate in reflecting the information of the structural anomaly. To tackle this problem, we present a Graph-enhanced multi-scale Contrastive Learning framework for Anomaly Detection, GCLAD. In this framework, we design a diffusion probabilistic model-based graph enhancement module to adaptively manipulate neighbors to generate enhanced graphs, which can efficiently enhance subgraph-level representations and alleviate the inconsistent problem. Further, we present a multi-scale contrastive module where we introduce meta-paths to exploit a few relevant neighbors to boost node-level representations, and build the multi-scale contrastive losses to promote anomaly detection performance. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of GCLAD compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

Information diffusion prediction is a vital component for a wide range of social applications, including viral marketing identification and personal recommendation. Prior methods primarily focus on learning target user representation by modeling contextual information from the historical retweet user sequence of a single cascade, overlooking the uncertainties that exist in both historical propagation trajectory and future diffusion trends. In this work, we propose DucDiff, a novel dual-consistent diffusion model for enhancing target user representation used for information diffusion prediction. DucDiff harnesses the distribution generation capability of the diffusion model to generate target user representations from a distributional perspective rather than a fixed vector. Specifically, it captures the multi-latent aspects (i.e., uncertainties) of target user representation from historical and future user sequences, respectively, using disentangled dual denoising modules. Additionally, a shared information bottleneck is designed for the cross-distillation of knowledge between the historical and future denoising modules, eliminating the performance gap between training and inference, while ensuring that future information can be implicitly introduced during the inference phase. Extensive experiments conducted on five datasets demonstrate that DucDiff significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Information diffusion prediction is a vital component for a wide range of social applications, including viral marketing identification and precise recommendation. Prior methods focus on modeling contextual information from a single cascade, ignoring rich collaborative information behind historical interactions across various cascades and future data within the cascade. Leveraging such interactions can substantially enhance diffusion prediction performance but presents two major challenges: (1) user intents are usually entangled behind historical interactions; and (2) utilizing future data may introduce severe training-inference discrepancies. We present MIM, a novel information diffusion model merging multi-scale interactions for improving user intent learning and behavior retrieval. Specifically, we convert cascades and social relations into multi-channel hypergraphs, where each channel depicts a common fine-grained user intent behind historical interactions across cascades. By aggregating embeddings learned through multiple channels, we obtain comprehensive intent representations. Second, we decouple past- and future-level temporal influences within a cascade via a dual temporal network. Then we implement past-future knowledge transferring to enhance the knowledge learnt from the dual network via hierarchical knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments conducted on four datasets demonstrate that MIM significantly outperforms various benchmarks.

Temporal knowledge graph reasoning is an essential task that holds immense value in diverse real-world applications. Existing studies mainly focus on leveraging structural and sequential dependencies, excelling in tasks like entity and link prediction. However, they confront a notable interpretability gap in their predictions, a pivotal facet for comprehending model behavior. In this study, we propose an innovative method, LSGAT, which not only exhibits remarkable precision in entity predictions but also enhances interpretability by identifying pivotal historical events influencing event predictions. LSGAT enables concise explanations for prediction outcomes, offering valuable insights into the otherwise enigmatic "black box" reasoning process. Through an exploration of the implications of the most influential events, it facilitates a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms governing predictions.

Earnings call transcripts hold valuable insights that are vital for investors and analysts when making informed decisions. However, extracting these insights from lengthy and complex transcripts can be a challenging task. The traditional manual examination is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors and biases. Deep learning-based representation learning methods have emerged as promising and automated approaches to tackle this problem. Nevertheless, they may encounter significant challenges, such as the unreliability of the representation encoding process and certain domain-specific requirements in the context of finance. To address these issues, we propose a novel transcript representation learning model. Our model leverages the structural information of transcripts to effectively extract key insights, while endowing model with explainability via variational information bottleneck. Extensive experiments on two downstream financial tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

The success of graph neural networks (GNNs) has spurred numerous new works leveraging GNNs for modeling multivariate time series anomaly detection. Despite their achieved performance improvements, most of them only consider static graph to describe the spatial-temporal dependencies between time series. Moreover, existing works neglect the time and scale-changing structures of time series. In this work, we propose MDGAD, a novel multi-scale dynamic graph structure learning approach for time series anomaly detection. We design a multi-scale graph structure learning module that captures the complex correlations among time series, constructing an evolving graph at each scale. Meanwhile, an anomaly detector is used to combine bilateral prediction errors to detect abnormal data. Experiments conducted on two time series datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MDGAD.

Graph anomaly detection has gained significant research interest across various domains. Due to the lack of labeled data, contrastive learning has been applied in detecting anomalies and various scales of contrastive strategies have been initiated. However, these methods might force two instances (e.g., node-level and subgraph-level representations) with different category labels to be consistent during model training, which can adversely impact the model robustness. To tackle this problem, we present a novel contrastive learning framework with the Diffusion model-based graph Enhancement module for Graph Anomaly Detection, DEGAD. In this framework, we design a diffusion model-based graph enhancement module to manipulate neighbors to generate enhanced graphs, which can efficiently alleviate the inconsistent problem. Further, based on the enhanced graphs, we present a multi-scale contrastive module to discriminate anomalies. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our model.

Trip recommendation aims to plan user’s travel based on their specified preferences. Traditional heuristic and statistical approaches often fail to capture the intricate nuances of user intentions, leading to subpar performance. Recent deep-learning methods show attractive accuracy but struggle to generate faithful trajectories that match user intentions. In this work, we propose a DDPM-based incremental knowledge injection module to ensure the faithfulness of the generated trajectories. Experiments on two datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach.

Graph anomaly detection has received remarkable research interests, and various techniques have been employed for enhancing detection performance. However, existing models tend to learn dataset-specific spurious correlations based on statistical associations. A well-trained model might suffer from performance degradation when applied to newly observed nodes with different environments. To handle this situation, we propose CounterFactual Graph Anomaly Detection model, CFGAD. In this model, we design a gradient-based separator to disentangle node features into class features and environment features. Then, we present a weight-varying diffusion model to combine class features and environment features from different nodes to generate counterfactual samples. These counterfactual samples will be adopted to enhance model robustness. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our CFGAD.

Information diffusion prediction is a critical task for many social network applications. However, current methods are mainly limited by the following aspects: user relationships behind resharing behaviors are complex and entangled. To address these issues, we propose MHGFormer, a novel multi-channel hypergraph transformer framework, to better decouple complex user relations and obtain fine-grained user representations. First, we employ designed triangular motifs to decouple user relations into three different level hypergraphs. Second, a position-aware hypergraph transformer is used to refine user relation and obtain high-quality user representations. Extensive experiments conducted on two social datasets demonstrate that MHGFormer outperforms state-of-the-art diffusion models across several settings.

Social media popularity prediction of multimodal user-generated content (UGC) is a crucial task for many real-world applications. However, existing efforts are often limited by missing inter-instance correlations and UGC temporal patterns. To address these issues, we propose a novel time-aware hypergraph Transformer framework, THGFormer. It fully represents inter-instance and intra-instance relations by hypergraphs, captures the temporal dependencies with a time encoder, and enhances UGC's representations via a neighborhood knowledge aggregation. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate that THGFormer outperforms state-of-the-art popularity prediction models across several settings.

Source localization, as a reverse problem of information dissemination on graphs, is crucial for tracking social rumors, detecting computer viruses, and identifying epidemic spreaders. However, existing methods face challenges due to the inherent uncertainty of graph diffusion, as the same diffused observations may start with diverse sources. Furthermore, general graph diffusion models did not consider important properties of the diffusion process. To address these issues, we propose a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM)-based source localization framework, DDSL. In this framework, we consider two distinct characteristics of information dissemination, namely source prominence and monotone increasing, and present a source localization-oriented invertible graph neural network (GNN). To capture the propagation uncertainties of sources, we design a DDPM-based source generator to generate effective and diverse sources for enhancing model’s robustness. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in improving source localization performance.

Accurately predicting the popularity of multimodal user-generated content (UGC) is fundamental for many real-world applications such as online advertising and recommendation. Existing approaches generally focus on limited contextual information within individual UGCs, yet overlook the potential benefit of exploiting meaningful knowledge in relevant UGCs. In this work, we propose RAGTrans, an aspect-aware retrieval-augmented multi-modal hypergraph transformer that retrieves pertinent knowledge from a multi-modal memory bank and enhances UGC representations via neighborhood knowledge aggregation on multi-model hypergraphs. In particular, we initially retrieve relevant multimedia instances from a large corpus of UGCs via the aspect information and construct a knowledge-enhanced hypergraph based on retrieved relevant instances. This allows capturing meaningful contextual information across the data. We then design a novel bootstrapping hypergraph transformer on multimodal hypergraphs to strengthen UGC representations across modalities via customizing a propagation algorithm to effectively diffuse information across nodes and edges. Additionally, we propose a user-aware attention-based fusion module to comprise the enriched UGC representations for popularity prediction. Extensive experiments on real-world social media datasets demonstrate that RAGTrans outperforms state-of-the-art popularity prediction models across settings.

Accurately predicting the popularity of micro-videos is crucial for real-world applications such as recommender systems and identifying viral marketing opportunities. Existing methods often focus on limited cross-modal information within individual micro-videos, overlooking the potential advantages of exploiting vast repository of past videos. We present MMRA, a multi-modal retrieval-augmented popularity prediction model that enhances prediction accuracy using relevant retrieved information. MMRA first retrieves relevant instances from a multi-modal memory bank, aligning video and text through transformation mechanisms involving a vision model and a text-based retriever. Additionally, a multi-modal interaction network is carefully designed to jointly capture cross-modal correlations within the target video and extract informative knowledge through retrieved instances, ultimately enhancing the prediction. Extensive experiments conducted on the real-world micro-video dataset demonstrate the superiority of MMRA when compared to state-of-the-art models. The code and data are available at https://github.com/ICDM-UESTC/MMRA.

Information diffusion prediction, which aims to infer the infected behavior of individual users during information spread, is critical for understanding the dynamics of information propagation and users' influence on online social media. To date, existing methods either focus on capturing limited contextual information from a single cascade, overlooking the potentially complex dependencies across different cascades, or they are committed to improving model performance by using intricate technologies to extract additional features as supplements to user representations, neglecting the drift of model performance across different platforms. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework called CARE (CAscade-REtrieved In-Context Learning) inspired by the concept of in-context learning in LLMs. Specifically, CARE first constructs a prompts pool derived from historical cascades, then utilizes ranking-based search engine techniques to retrieve prompts with similar patterns based on the query. Moreover, CARE also introduces two augmentation strategies alongside social relationship enhancement to enrich the input context. Finally, the transformed query-cascade representation from a GPT-type architecture is projected to obtain the prediction. Experiments on real-world datasets from various platforms show that CARE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of effectiveness and robustness in information diffusion prediction.

Information cascade popularity prediction is an important problem in social network content diffusion analysis. Various facets have been investigated (e.g., diffusion structures and patterns, user influence) and, recently, deep learning models based on sequential architecture and graph neural network (GNN) have been leveraged. However, despite the improvements attained in predicting the future popularity, these methodologies fail to capture two essential aspects inherent to information diffusion: (1) the temporal irregularity of cascade event – i.e., users’ re-tweetings at random and non-periodic time instants; and (2) the inherent uncertainty of the information diffusion. To address these challenges, in this work, we present CasDO – a novel framework for information cascade popularity prediction with probabilistic diffusion models and neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs). We devise a temporal ODE network to generalize the discrete state transitions in RNNs to continuous-time dynamics. CasDO introduces a probabilistic diffusion model to consider the uncertainties in information diffusion by injecting noises in the forwarding process and reconstructing cascade embedding in the reversing process. Extensive experiments that we conducted on three large-scale datasets demonstrate the advantages of the CasDO model over baselines.

Predicting information cascade popularity is a fundamental problem for understanding the nature of information propagation on social media. However, existing works fail to capture an essential aspect of information propagation: the temporal irregularity of cascade event -- i.e., users' re-tweetings at random and non-periodic time instants. In this work, we present a novel framework CasODE for information cascade prediction with neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs). CasODE generalizes the discrete state transitions in RNNs to continuous-time dynamics for modeling the irregular-sampled events in information cascades. Experimental evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate the advantages of the CasODE over baseline approaches.

Accurately predicting information diffusion is critical for a vast range of applications. Existing methods generally consider user re-sharing behaviors to be driven by a single intent, and/or assume cascade temporal influence to be unchanged, which might not be consistent with real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a self-supervised disentanglement framework (DisenIDP) for information diffusion prediction. First, we construct intent-aware hypergraphs to capture users' potential intents from different perspectives, and then perform the light hypergraph convolution to adaptively activate disentangled intents. Second, we extract long-term and short-term cascade influence via independent attention-based encoders. Finally, we set a self-supervised disentanglement task to alleviate the information loss and learn better-disentanglement representations. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world social datasets demonstrate that DisenIDP outperforms state-of-the-art models across several settings.

The exponential growth of digital information has amplified the necessity for effective rumor detection on social media. However, existing approaches often neglect the inherent noise and uncertainty in rumor propagation, leading to obscure learning mechanisms. Moreover, current deep-learning methodologies, despite their top-tier performance, are heavily dependent on supervised learning, which is labor-intensive and inefficient. Their prediction credibility is also questionable. To tackle these issues, we present a new framework, TrustRD, for reliable rumor detection. Our framework incorporates a self-supervised learning module, designed to derive interpretable and informative representations with less reliance on large labeled data sets. A downstream model based on Bayesian networks, which is further refined with adversarial training, enhances performance while providing a quantifiable trustworthiness assessment of results. Our methods' effectiveness is confirmed through experiments on two benchmark datasets.

Discovering interesting yet unvisited point-of-interests (POIs) is among the most practical applications but challenging problems in location-based social networks (LBSNs). Popular approaches face several issues, such as data sparsity and difficulties in modeling latent nonlinearity between users and POIs. Furthermore, the uncertainty in LBSNs poses additional obstacles to learning good representations of users’ general and current interests. To effectively address these issues, we postulate that fusing multiple sources of information is paramount. Toward that, we propose a novel deep generative recommender system—Wasserstein autoencoder for POI recommendation (WaPOIR). It unifies the information from users’ personal preference, social influence, and geographical data, and captures users’ general interests from historical check-ins, while modeling users’ current interests from recently visited POIs. Unlike previous methods, WaPOIR learns the latent distribution of data in the Wasserstein space as a potential representation for each POI and each user in LBSNs. This enables simultaneous maintenance of social and POI interactions and modeling the uncertainty of their relationships. WaPOIR is a stochastic recommendation approach that allows Bayesian inference and approximation of variational posterior distribution. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world LBSN datasets demonstrate that WaPOIR achieves better performance over the state-of-the-art approaches.

This paper exploits self-supervised learning (SSL) to learn more accurate and robust representations from the user-item interaction graph. Particularly, we propose a novel SSL model that effectively leverages contrastive multi-view learning and pseudo-siamese network to construct a pre-training and post-training framework. Moreover, we present three graph augmentation techniques during the pre-training stage and explore the effects of combining different augmentations, which allow us to learn general and robust representations for the GNN-based recommendation. Simple experimental evaluations on real-world datasets show that the proposed solution significantly improves the recommendation accuracy, especially for sparse data, and is also noise resistant.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and its many variants have recently been successfully utilized to tackle various recommendation tasks. Although effective, existing methods still face several limitations. First, supervision signal sparsity makes it difficult for them to learn high-quality representations and optimize the model parameters. Second, the learned representations are vulnerable to noisy interactions, as the neighborhood aggregation scheme increases the impact of observed edges. To alleviate these issues, we exploit self-supervised learning (SSL) to learn more accurate and robust representations from the user-item interaction graph. Particularly, we propose a novel SSL model that effectively integrates contrastive multi-view learning and pseudo-siamese network to construct a pre-training and post-training framework. Moreover, we present three data augmentation techniques during the pre-training stage and explore the effects of combining different augmentations, which allow us to learn more general and robust representations for the recommendation. Experimental evaluations on two real-world datasets show that the proposed solution significantly improves the recommendation accuracy, especially for sparse supervision signal, and is also noise resistant.