Auditing recommendation systems has attracted growing attention due to increasing concerns over filter bubbles, unfairness, and data misuse. A common approach is sock-puppet auditing, where autonomous agents interact with platforms to reveal risks. However, existing approaches rely on hard-coded agents, lacking adaptability to dynamic GUI layouts and generating behaviors far from those of real users, limiting the comprehensiveness and representativeness of assessment. To address these issues, we introduce AuditAgent, an LLM-powered GUI-agent framework for risk auditing. AuditAgent simulates realistic user preferences and performs adaptive, human-like interactions on recommendation platforms. This design enables more thorough and faithful auditing, providing comprehensive assessments across multiple risk dimensions, including filter bubbles, unfairness, and data misuse.

Real-world user behaviors are often noisy due to factors such as human errors, uncertainty, and behavioral ambiguity, which can lead to degraded recommendation performance. To address this issue, recent approaches widely adopt self-supervised learning (SSL), particularly contrastive learning, by generating perturbed views of user interaction sequences and maximizing their mutual information to improve model robustness. However, these methods heavily rely on their pre-defined static augmentation strategies~(where the augmentation type remains fixed once chosen) to construct augmented views, leading to two critical challenges: (1) the optimal augmentation type can vary significantly across different scenarios; (2) inappropriate augmentations may even degrade recommendation performance, limiting the effectiveness of SSL. To overcome these limitations, we propose an adaptive augmentation framework. We first unify existing basic augmentation operations into a unified formulation via structured transformation matrices. Building on this formulation, we introduce AsarRec, an Adaptive Sequential Augmentation for Robust Sequential Recommendation. To enable stable end-to-end optimization of discrete and strongly constrained augmentations, AsarRec learns to generate transformation matrices by encoding user sequences into probabilistic transition matrices and projecting them into hard semi-doubly stochastic matrices via a differentiable Semi-Sinkhorn algorithm. To ensure that the learned augmentations benefit downstream performance, we jointly optimize three objectives: diversity (encouraging distinct views), semantic invariance (preserving semantic consistency among views), and informativeness (identifying augmentations most beneficial to recommendation). Extensive experiments on four benchmarks under varying noise levels validate the effectiveness of AsarRec, demonstrating its superior robustness and consistent improvements.

Wanli Yang, Fei Sun, Jiajun Tan, Xinyu Ma, Qi Cao, Dawei Yin, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Hexiang Tan, Fei Sun, Sha Liu, Du Su, Qi Cao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yuanzhuo Wang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

While implicit feedback is foundational to modern recommender systems, factors such as human error, uncertainty, and ambiguity in user behavior inevitably introduce significant noise into this feedback, adversely affecting the accuracy and robustness of recommendations. To address this issue, existing methods typically aim to reduce the training weight of noisy feedback or discard it entirely, based on the observation that noisy interactions often exhibit higher losses in the overall loss distribution. However, we identify two key issues: (1) there is a significant overlap between normal and noisy interactions in the overall loss distribution, and (2) this overlap becomes even more pronounced when transitioning from pointwise loss functions (e.g., BCE loss) to pairwise loss functions (e.g., BPR loss). This overlap leads traditional methods to misclassify noisy interactions as normal, and vice versa. To tackle these challenges, we further investigate the loss overlap and find that for a given user, there is a clear distinction between normal and noisy interactions in the user's personal loss distribution. Based on this insight, we propose a resampling strategy to Denoise using the user's Personal Loss distribution, named PLD, which reduces the probability of noisy interactions being optimized. Specifically, during each optimization iteration, we create a candidate item pool for each user and resample the items from this pool based on the user's personal loss distribution, prioritizing normal interactions. Additionally, we conduct a theoretical analysis to validate PLD's effectiveness and suggest ways to further enhance its performance. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets with varying noise ratios demonstrate PLD's efficacy and robustness.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are playing an increasingly crucial role in people's lives, and their frequent unfair behaviors raise concerns about fairness. To unveil the unfairness in AI systems, researchers conduct fairness auditing on these systems. However, existing fairness auditing works often focus on group fairness while ignoring discriminatory phenomena among individuals. To unearth discriminatory phenomena against individuals within AI systems, this paper proposes an individual fairness auditing framework, termed ''substantiating'', which can identify discrimination instances within AI systems by constructing individual samples. To construct these samples for substantiating, auditors often have to rely on subjective prior knowledge, lacking guidelines on how to construct unfair samples. To address this issue, this paper introduces two categories of automated sample generation methods that can rapidly find unfair samples within a limited number of queries to the system and demonstrate their effectiveness through experiments. This paper evaluates the proposed auditing framework among three categories of stakeholders in AI fairness: auditors, AI model developers, and non-technical personnel. The research findings point out their demand for individual fairness audits of AI systems and highlight how the framework supports a reliable and convenient individual fairness audit.

While auxiliary information has become a key to enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), relatively little is known about how LLMs merge these contexts, specifically contexts generated by LLMs and those retrieved from external sources.To investigate this, we formulate a systematic framework to identify whether LLMs' responses are attributed to either generated or retrieved contexts.To easily trace the origin of the response, we construct datasets with conflicting contexts, i.e., each question is paired with both generated and retrieved contexts, yet only one of them contains the correct answer.Our experiments reveal a significant bias in several LLMs (GPT-4/3.5 and Llama2) to favor generated contexts, even when they provide incorrect information.We further identify two key factors contributing to this bias: i) contexts generated by LLMs typically show greater similarity to the questions, increasing their likelihood of being selected; ii) the segmentation process used in retrieved contexts disrupts their completeness, thereby hindering their full utilization in LLMs.Our analysis enhances the understanding of how LLMs merge diverse contexts, offers valuable insights for advancing current LLM augmentation methods, and highlights the risk of generated misinformation for retrieval-augmented LLMs 1 .

Adversarial Collaborative Filtering (ACF), which typically applies adversarial perturbations at user and item embeddings through adversarial training, is widely recognized as an effective strategy for enhancing the robustness of Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommender systems against poisoning attacks. Besides, numerous studies have empirically shown that ACF can also improve recommendation performance compared to traditional CF. Despite these empirical successes, the theoretical understanding of ACF's effectiveness in terms of both performance and robustness remains unclear. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we first theoretically show that ACF can achieve a lower recommendation error compared to traditional CF with the same training epochs in both clean and poisoned data contexts. Furthermore, by establishing bounds for reductions in recommendation error during ACF's optimization process, we find that applying personalized magnitudes of perturbation for different users based on their embedding scales can further improve ACF's effectiveness. Building on these theoretical understandings, we propose Personalized Magnitude Adversarial Collaborative Filtering (PamaCF). Extensive experiments demonstrate that PamaCF effectively defends against various types of poisoning attacks while significantly enhancing recommendation performance.

Recent studies have demonstrated the vulnerability of recommender systems to data poisoning attacks, where adversaries inject carefully crafted fake user interactions into the training data of recommenders to promote target items. Current attack methods involve iteratively retraining a surrogate recommender on the poisoned data with the latest fake users to optimize the attack. However, this repetitive retraining is highly time-consuming, hindering the efficient assessment and optimization of fake users. To mitigate this computational bottleneck and develop a more effective attack in an affordable time, we analyze the retraining process and find that a change in the representation of one user/item will cause a cascading effect through the user-item interaction graph. Under theoretical guidance, we introduce Gradient Passing (GP), a novel technique that explicitly passes gradients between interacted user-item pairs during backpropagation, thereby approximating the cascading effect and accelerating retraining. With just a single update, GP can achieve effects comparable to multiple original training iterations. Under the same number of retraining epochs, GP enables a closer approximation of the surrogate recommender to the victim. This more accurate approximation provides better guidance for optimizing fake users, ultimately leading to enhanced data poisoning attacks. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed GP.

Recommender systems play a pivotal role in mitigating information overload in various fields. Nonetheless, the inherent openness of these systems introduces vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to insert fake users into the system’s training data to skew the exposure of certain items, known as poisoning attacks. Adversarial training has emerged as a notable defense mechanism against such poisoning attacks within recommender systems. Existing adversarial training methods apply perturbations of the same magnitude across all users to enhance system robustness against attacks. Yet, in reality, we find that attacks often affect only a subset of users who are vulnerable. These perturbations of indiscriminate magnitude make it difficult to balance effective protection for vulnerable users without degrading recommendation quality for those who are not affected. To address this issue, our research delves into understanding user vulnerability. Considering that poisoning attacks pollute the training data, we note that the higher degree to which a recommender system fits users’ training data correlates with an increased likelihood of users incorporating attack information, indicating their vulnerability. Leveraging these insights, we introduce the Vulnerability-aware Adversarial Training (VAT), designed to defend against poisoning attacks in recommender systems. VAT employs a novel vulnerability-aware function to estimate users’ vulnerability based on the degree to which the system fits them. Guided by this estimation, VAT applies perturbations of adaptive magnitude to each user, not only reducing the success ratio of attacks but also preserving, and potentially enhancing, the quality of recommendations. Comprehensive experiments confirm VAT’s superior defensive capabilities across different recommendation models and against various types of attacks.

Sequential recommender systems stand out for their ability to capture users' dynamic interests and the patterns of item transitions. However, the inherent openness of sequential recommender systems renders them vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where fraudsters are injected into the training data to manipulate learned patterns. Traditional defense methods predominantly depend on predefined assumptions or rules extracted from specific known attacks, limiting their generalizability to unknown attacks. To solve the above problems, considering the rich open-world knowledge encapsulated in Large Language Models (LLMs), we attempt to introduce LLMs into defense methods to broaden the knowledge beyond limited known attacks. We propose LoRec, an innovative framework that employs LLM-Enhanced Calibration to strengthen the robustness of sequential Recommender systems against poisoning attacks. LoRec integrates an LLM-enhanced CalibraTor (LCT) that refines the training process of sequential recommender systems with knowledge derived from LLMs, applying a user-wise reweighting to diminish the impact of attacks. Incorporating LLMs' open-world knowledge, the LCT effectively converts the limited, specific priors or rules into a more general pattern of fraudsters, offering improved defenses against poisons. Our comprehensive experiments validate that LoRec, as a general framework, significantly strengthens the robustness of sequential recommender systems.

Despite achieving great success, graph neural networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Existing defenses focus on developing adversarial training or model modification. In this paper, we propose and formulategraph adversarial immunization, i.e., vaccinating part of graph structure to improve certifiable robustness of graph against any admissible adversarial attack. We first propose edge-level immunization to vaccinate node pairs. Unfortunately, such edge-level immunization cannot defend against emerging node injection attacks, since it only immunizes existing node pairs. To this end, we further propose node-level immunization. To avoid computationally intensive combinatorial optimization associated with adversarial immunization, we developAdvImmune-EdgeandAdvImmune-Nodealgorithms to effectively obtain the immune node pairs or nodes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of AdvImmune methods. In particular, AdvImmune-Node remarkably improves the ratio of robust nodes by 79$\%$, 294$\%$, and 100$\%$, after immunizing only 5$\%$of nodes. Furthermore, AdvImmune methods show excellent defensive performance against various attacks, outperforming state-of-the-art defenses. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to improve certifiable robustness from graph data perspective without losing performance on clean graphs, providing new insights into graph adversarial learning.

Unsupervised representation learning for dynamic graphs has attracted a lot of research attention in recent years. Compared with static graph, the dynamic graph is a comprehensive embodiment of both the intrinsic stable characteristics of nodes and the time-related dynamic preference. However, existing methods generally mix these two types of information into a single representation space, which may lead to poor explanation, less robustness, and a limited ability when applied to different downstream tasks. To solve the above problems, in this paper, we propose a novel disenTangled representation learning framework for discrete-time Dynamic graphs, namely DyTed. We specially design a temporal-clips contrastive learning task together with a structure contrastive learning to effectively identify the time-invariant and time-varying representations respectively. To further enhance the disentanglement of these two types of representation, we propose a disentanglement-aware discriminator under an adversarial learning framework from the perspective of information theory. Extensive experiments on Tencent and five commonly used public datasets demonstrate that DyTed, as a general framework that can be applied to existing methods, achieves state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks, as well as be more robust against noise.

"Transaction fraud" complaint verification, i.e., verifying whether a transaction corresponding to a complaint is fraudulent, is particularly critical to prevent economic loss. Compared with traditional fraud pre-transaction detection, complaint verification puts forward higher requirements: 1)an individual tends to exhibit different identities in different complaints, e.g., complainant or respondent, requiring the model to capture identity-related representations corresponding to the complaint; 2)the fraud ways evolve frequently to confront detection, requiring the model to perform stably under different fraud ways. Previous methods mainly focused on fraud pre-transaction detection, utilizing the historical information of users or conduct message passing based GNNs on relationship networks. However, they rarely consider capturing various identity-related representations and ignore the evolution of fraud ways, leading to failure in complaint verification. To address the above challenges, we propose the mutual information based dual level graph neural network, namely MIDLG, which defines a complaint as a super-node consisting of involved individuals, and characterizes the individual over node-level and super-node-level. Furthermore, the mutual information minimization objective is proposed based on "complaint verification-causal graph" to decouple the model prediction from relying on specific fraud ways, and thus achieve stability. MIDLG achieves SOTA results through extensive experiments in complaint verification on WeChat Finance, one online payment service serving more than 600 million users in China.

Training generative adversarial networks (GANs) with limited data is challenging because the discriminator is prone to overfitting. Previously proposed differentiable augmentation demonstrates improved data efficiency of training GANs. However, the augmentation implicitly introduces undesired invariance to augmentation for the discriminator since it ignores the change of semantics in the label space caused by data transformation, which may limit the representation learning ability of the discriminator and ultimately affect the generative modeling performance of the generator. To mitigate the negative impact of invariance while inheriting the benefits of data augmentation, we propose a novel augmentation-aware self-supervised discriminator that predicts the augmentation parameter of the augmented data. Particularly, the prediction targets of real data and generated data are required to be distinguished since they are different during training. We further encourage the generator to adversarially learn from the self-supervised discriminator by generating augmentation-predictable real and not fake data. This formulation connects the learning objective of the generator and the arithmetic $-$ harmonic mean divergence under certain assumptions. We compare our method with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods using the class-conditional BigGAN and unconditional StyleGAN2 architectures on data-limited CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, FFHQ, LSUN-Cat, and five low-shot datasets. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements of our method over SOTA methods in training data-efficient GANs.

Recommender systems often suffer from popularity bias, where popular items are overly recommended while sacrificing unpopular items. Existing researches generally focus on ensuring the number of recommendations (exposure) of each item is equal or proportional, using inverse propensity weighting, causal intervention, or adversarial training. However, increasing the exposure of unpopular items may not bring more clicks or interactions, resulting in skewed benefits and failing in achieving real reasonable popularity debiasing. In this paper, we propose a new criterion for popularity debiasing, i.e., in an unbiased recommender system, both popular and unpopular items should receive Interactions Proportional to the number of users who Like it, namely IPL criterion. Under the guidance of the criterion, we then propose a debiasing framework with IPL regularization term which is theoretically shown to achieve a win-win situation of both popularity debiasing and recommendation performance. Experiments conducted on four public datasets demonstrate that when equipping two representative collaborative filtering models with our framework, the popularity bias is effectively alleviated while maintaining the recommendation performance.

Conditional generative models aim to learn the underlying joint distribution of data and labels to achieve conditional data generation. Among them, the auxiliary classifier generative adversarial network (AC-GAN) has been widely used, but suffers from the problem of low intra-class diversity of the generated samples. The fundamental reason pointed out in this paper is that the classifier of AC-GAN is generator-agnostic, which therefore cannot provide informative guidance for the generator to approach the joint distribution, resulting in a minimization of the conditional entropy that decreases the intra-class diversity. Motivated by this understanding, we propose a novel conditional GAN with an auxiliary discriminative classifier (ADC-GAN) to resolve the above problem. Specifically, the proposed auxiliary discriminative classifier becomes generator-aware by recognizing the class-labels of the real data and the generated data discriminatively. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the generator can faithfully learn the joint distribution even without the original discriminator, making the proposed ADC-GAN robust to the value of the coefficient hyperparameter and the selection of the GAN loss, and stable during training. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of ADC-GAN in conditional generative modeling compared to state-of-the-art classifier-based and projection-based conditional GANs.

Contrastive learning gains remarkable success in graph representation learning through imposing two properties to node representations, i.e., aligning representations of similar nodes in different augmented graphs and uniformly distributing node representations on the hypersphere. Existing graph contrastive learning methods capture these two key properties by extensive negative examples, resulting in unbearable computational costs. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel graph contrastive learning method, i.e., GraphALU, to capture these two properties without negative examples. For alignment, we leverage both self-alignment, i.e., pulling the representations of the same node in different augmented graphs together, and neighbor-alignment, pulling the representations of neighboring nodes in different augmented graphs together to capture the structure proximity among nodes. For uniformity, we innovatively design a star-shaped distance comparison, i.e., convert the distance comparison of any pair of nodes to the distance comparison of any nodes with a virtual center node, reducing the quadratic computational cost to a linear one with respect to the number of nodes. Extensive experiments show both the effectiveness and efficiency of GraphALU on various established benchmark datasets and downstream tasks.

Collaborative filtering is one of the most common scenarios and popular research topics in recommender systems. Among existing methods, latent factor models, i.e., learning a specific embedding for each user/item by reconstructing the observed interaction matrix, have shown excellent performances. However, such user-specific and item-specific embeddings are intrinsically transductive, making it difficult for them to deal with new users and new items unseen during training. Besides, the number of model parameters heavily depends on the number of all users and items, restricting their scalability to real-world applications. To solve the above challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel model-agnostic and scalable Inductive Embedding Module for collaborative filtering, namely INMO. INMO generates the inductive embeddings for users (items) by characterizing their interactions with some template items (template users), instead of employing an embedding lookup table. Under the theoretical analysis, we further propose an effective indicator for the selection of template users and template items. Our proposed INMO can be attached to existing latent factor models as a pre-module, inheriting the expressiveness of backbone models, while bringing the inductive ability and reducing model parameters. We validate the generality of INMO by attaching it to Matrix Factorization (MF) and LightGCN, which are two representative latent factor models for collaborative filtering. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of INMO in both transductive and inductive recommendation scenarios.

Consumer loans, i.e., loans to finance consumers to buy certain types of expenditures, is increasingly popular in e-commerce platform. Different from traditional loans with mortgage, online consumer loans only take personal credit as collateral for loans. Consequently, loan fraud detection is particularly critical for lenders to avoid economic loss. Previous methods mainly leverage applicant's attributes and historical behavior for loan fraud detection. Although these methods gain success at detecting potential charge-offs, yet they perform worse when multiple persons with various roles (e.g., sellers, intermediaries) collude to apply fraudulent loan. To combat this challenge, we consider the problem of loan fraud detection via exploiting roles of users and multi-type social relationships among users. We propose a novel Graph neural network with a Role-constrained Conditional random field, namely GRC, to learn the representation of applicants and detect loan fraud based on the learned representation. The proposed model characterizes the multiple types of relationships via self-attention mechanism and employs conditional random field to constrain users with the same role to have similar representation. We validate the proposed model through experiments in large-scale auto-loan scenario. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art results in loan fraud detection on Alipay, one online credit payment service serving more than 450 million users in China.

Signed networks are such social networks having both positive and negative links. A lot of theories and algorithms have been developed to model such networks (e.g., balance theory). However, previous work mainly focuses on the unipartite signed networks where the nodes have the same type. Signed bipartite networks are different from classical signed networks, which contain two different node sets and signed links between two node sets. Signed bipartite networks can be commonly found in many fields including business, politics, and academics, but have been less studied. In this work, we firstly define the signed relationship of the same set of nodes and provide a new perspective for analyzing signed bipartite networks. Then we do some comprehensive analysis of balance theory from two perspectives on several real-world datasets. Specifically, in the peer review dataset, we find that the ratio of balanced isomorphism in signed bipartite networks increased after rebuttal phases. Guided by these two perspectives, we propose a novel Signed Bipartite Graph Neural Networks (SBGNNs) to learn node embeddings for signed bipartite networks. SBGNNs follow most GNNs message-passing scheme, but we design new message functions, aggregation functions, and update functions for signed bipartite networks. We validate the effectiveness of our model on four real-world datasets on Link Sign Prediction task, which is the main machine learning task for signed networks. Experimental results show that our SBGNN model achieves significant improvement compared with strong baseline methods, including feature-based methods and network embedding methods.

Node injection attack on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is an emerging and practical attack scenario that the attacker injects malicious nodes rather than modifying original nodes or edges to affect the performance of GNNs. However, existing node injection attacks ignore extremely limited scenarios, namely the injected nodes might be excessive such that they may be perceptible to the target GNN. In this paper, we focus on an extremely limited scenario of single node injection evasion attack, i.e., the attacker is only allowed to inject one single node during the test phase to hurt GNN's performance. The discreteness of network structure and the coupling effect between network structure and node features bring great challenges to this extremely limited scenario. We first propose an optimization-based method to explore the performance upper bound of single node injection evasion attack. Experimental results show that 100%, 98.60%, and 94.98% nodes on three public datasets are successfully attacked even when only injecting one node with one edge, confirming the feasibility of single node injection evasion attack. However, such an optimization-based method needs to be re-optimized for each attack, which is computationally unbearable. To solve the dilemma, we further propose a Generalizable Node Injection Attack model, namely G-NIA, to improve the attack efficiency while ensuring the attack performance. Experiments are conducted across three well-known GNNs. Our proposed G-NIA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and is 500 times faster than the optimization-based method when inferring.

Recently, transformation-based self-supervised learning has been applied to generative adversarial networks (GANs) to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in the discriminator by introducing a stationary learning environment. However, the separate self-supervised tasks in existing self-supervised GANs cause a goal inconsistent with generative modeling due to the fact that their self-supervised classifiers are agnostic to the generator distribution. To address this problem, we propose a novel self-supervised GAN that unifies the GAN task with the self-supervised task by augmenting the GAN labels (real or fake) via self-supervision of data transformation. Specifically, the original discriminator and self-supervised classifier are unified into a label-augmented discriminator that predicts the augmented labels to be aware of both the generator distribution and the data distribution under every transformation, and then provide the discrepancy between them to optimize the generator. Theoretically, we prove that the optimal generator could converge to replicate the real data distribution. Empirically, we show that the proposed method significantly outperforms previous self-supervised and data augmentation GANs on both generative modeling and representation learning across benchmark datasets.

Despite achieving strong performance in semi-supervised node classification task, graph neural networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, similar to other deep learning models. Existing researches focus on developing either robust GNN models or attack detection methods against adversarial attacks on graphs. However, little research attention is paid to the potential and practice of immunization to adversarial attacks on graphs. In this paper, we propose and formulate the graph adversarial immunization problem, i.e., vaccinating an affordable fraction of node pairs, connected or unconnected, to improve the certifiable robustness of graph against any admissible adversarial attack. We further propose an effective algorithm, called AdvImmune, which optimizes with meta-gradient in a discrete way to circumvent the computationally expensive combinatorial optimization when solving the adversarial immunization problem. Experiments are conducted on two citation networks and one social network. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed AdvImmune method remarkably improves the ratio of robust nodes by 12%, 42%, 65%, with an affordable immune budget of only 5% edges.

Predicting the popularity of online content on social platforms is an important task for both researchers and practitioners. Previous methods mainly leverage demographics, temporal and structural patterns of early adopters for popularity prediction. However, most existing methods are less effective to precisely capture the cascading effect in information diffusion, in which early adopters try to activate potential users along the underlying network. In this paper, we consider the problem of network-aware popularity prediction, leveraging both early adopters and social networks for popularity prediction. We propose to capture the cascading effect explicitly, modeling the activation state of a target user given the activation state and influence of his/her neighbors. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel method, namely CoupledGNN, which uses two coupled graph neural networks to capture the interplay between node activation states and the spread of influence. By stacking graph neural network layers, our proposed method naturally captures the cascading effect along the network in a successive manner. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real-world Sina Weibo datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for popularity prediction.

Graph convolutional networks gain remarkable success in semi-supervised learning on graph-structured data. The key to graph-based semisupervised learning is capturing the smoothness of labels or features over nodes exerted by graph structure. Previous methods, spectral methods and spatial methods, devote to defining graph convolution as a weighted average over neighboring nodes, and then learn graph convolution kernels to leverage the smoothness to improve the performance of graph-based semi-supervised learning. One open challenge is how to determine appropriate neighborhood that reflects relevant information of smoothness manifested in graph structure. In this paper, we propose GraphHeat, leveraging heat kernel to enhance low-frequency filters and enforce smoothness in the signal variation on the graph. GraphHeat leverages the local structure of target node under heat diffusion to determine its neighboring nodes flexibly, without the constraint of order suffered by previous methods. GraphHeat achieves state-of-the-art results in the task of graph-based semi-supervised classification across three benchmark datasets: Cora, Citeseer and Pubmed.

Online social media remarkably facilitates the production and delivery of information, intensifying the competition among vast information for users' attention and highlighting the importance of predicting the popularity of information. Existing approaches for popularity prediction fall into two paradigms: feature-based approaches and generative approaches. Feature-based approaches extract various features (e.g., user, content, structural, and temporal features), and predict the future popularity of information by training a regression/classification model. Their predictive performance heavily depends on the quality of hand-crafted features. In contrast, generative approaches devote to characterizing and modeling the process that a piece of information accrues attentions, offering us high ease to understand the underlying mechanisms governing the popularity dynamics of information cascades. But they have less desirable predictive power since they are not optimized for popularity prediction. In this paper, we propose DeepHawkes to combat the defects of existing methods, leveraging end-to-end deep learning to make an analogy to interpretable factors of Hawkes process --- a widely-used generative process to model information cascade. DeepHawkes inherits the high interpretability of Hawkes process and possesses the high predictive power of deep learning methods, bridging the gap between prediction and understanding of information cascades. We verify the effectiveness of DeepHawkes by applying it to predict retweet cascades of Sina Weibo and citation cascades of a longitudinal citation dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that DeepHawkes outperforms both feature-based and generative approaches.