SNBot: Modeling Self-Neighborhood Representation Discrepancy for Social Bot Detection
Abstract
The proliferation of social bots poses a persistent threat to online social platforms, making accurate and efficient detection increasingly critical. Although recent graph-based methods have achieved notable progress by modeling user interactions, many of them implicitly assume neighborhood consistency and degrade in sparse, directed, and heterophilic social graphs, where a user's neighborhood may poorly reflect its own attributes. In this work, we propose SNBot, a novel social bot detection framework that explicitly models the discrepancy between node self-representations and their neighborhood embeddings. SNBot first learns unified self-representations from multi-modal user attributes through a lightweight type-aware encoding scheme. It then performs message passing on an augmented directed graph using a bidirectional aggregation mechanism, which separately captures incoming and outgoing interactions to better characterize asymmetric behaviors. By preserving and exploiting self–neighborhood representation discrepancies rather than over-smoothing them, SNBot produces more discriminative node representations. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that SNBot consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weizhou Shen | 34 | 100 Directed Acyclic Graph Network for Conversational Emotion Recognition (2021) Social Media and User Modelling 100 Multi-Party Conversation Modeling for Emotion Recognition (2024) Social Media and User Modelling 100 DialogXL: All-in-One XLNet for Multi-Party Conversation Emotion Recognition (2021) Social Media and User Modelling |
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| 2 | Xinhang Li 0001 | 26 | 100 Conditional Cross-Platform User Engagement Prediction (2024) Social Media and User Modelling 24 OpenSiteRec: An Open Dataset for Site Recommendation (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation 20 Optimal Transport Enhanced Cross-City Site Recommendation (2024) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Yi R. Fung 0001 | 29 |
Area-chair candidates (6)
| Yi R. Fung 0001 assigned | 29 | 10 papers | |
| Kam-Fai Wong | 26 | 6 papers | |
| Ziyi Ye | 24 | 14 papers | |
| Yankai Chen 0001 | 23 | 6 papers | |
| Xin Xin 0003 | 23 | 10 papers | |
| Pengyue Jia | 23 | 10 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sruthi Gorantla | 37 | 3 | 100 CASCADE: Contextual Sarcasm Detection in Online Discussion Forums (2018) Social Media and User Modelling 100 Aspect-Sentiment Embeddings for Company Profiling and Employee Opinion Mining (2018) Social Media and User Modelling |
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| 2 | Weizhou Shen assigned | 34 | 3 | 100 Directed Acyclic Graph Network for Conversational Emotion Recognition (2021) Social Media and User Modelling 100 Multi-Party Conversation Modeling for Emotion Recognition (2024) Social Media and User Modelling |
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| 3 | Jimeng Sun 0001 | 32 | 3 | 100 Confluence: conformity influence in large social networks (2013) Social Media and User Modelling 100 MetaFac: community discovery via relational hypergraph factorization (2009) Social Media and User Modelling |
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| 4 | Zihan Ma 0001 | 31 | 3 | 100 TwiBot-22: Towards Graph-Based Twitter Bot Detection (2022) Social Media and User Modelling 62 How Do Social Bots Participate in Misinformation Spread? A Comprehensive Dataset and Analysis (2025) Social Media and User Modelling |
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| 6 | Lingling Yi | 27 | 3 | 100 WeSeer: Visual Analysis for Better Information Cascade Prediction of WeChat Articles (2020) Social Media and User Modelling 29 Robust Preference-Guided Denoising for Graph based Social Recommendation (2023) Social and Group Graph Recommendation |
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| 8 | Xinhang Li 0001 assigned | 26 | 3 | 100 Conditional Cross-Platform User Engagement Prediction (2024) Social Media and User Modelling 24 OpenSiteRec: An Open Dataset for Site Recommendation (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 9 | Seongmin Park 0002 | 26 | 3 | 29 Toward a Better Understanding of Loss Functions for Collaborative Filtering (2023) Negative Sampling and Loss Functions 28 Empowering Retrieval-based Conversational Recommendation with Contrasting User Preferences (2025) Conversational and Interactive Recommendation |
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| 10 | Zechun Niu | 26 | 3 | 28 Distributionally Robust Optimization for Unbiased Learning to Rank (2025) Unbiased Learning to Rank 27 Addressing Personalized Bias for Unbiased Learning to Rank (2025) Unbiased Learning to Rank |
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| 11 | Jin Chen 0008 | 25 | 3 | 35 When large language models meet personalization: perspectives of challenges and opportunities (2024) User Profile and Persona Modeling 29 Ranking-Based Implicit Regularization for One-Class Collaborative Filtering (2022) Negative Sampling and Loss Functions |
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| 12 | Shijie Wang 0002 | 25 | 3 | 65 Score-Based Generative Diffusion Models for Social Recommendations (2025) Social Media and User Modelling 33 Towards Next-Generation Recommender Systems: A Benchmark for Personalized Recommendation Assistant with LLMs (2026) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 13 | Jianling Wang | 25 | 3 | 38 User Recommendation in Content Curation Platforms (2020) Social and Group Recommendation 29 Improving Top-K Recommendation via JointCollaborative Autoencoders (2019) Negative Sampling and Loss Functions |
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| 14 | James Caverlee | 25 | 3 | 69 Learning Geo-Social User Topical Profiles with Bayesian Hierarchical User Factorization (2018) Social Media and User Modelling 38 User Recommendation in Content Curation Platforms (2020) Social and Group Recommendation |
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| 15 | Hyunsik Yoo | 24 | 3 | 28 Capturing User Interests from Data Streams for Continual Sequential Recommendation (2026) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation 27 Class-Imbalanced Graph Learning without Class Rebalancing (2024) Graph Anomaly and Out-of-Distribution Detection |
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| 16 | Bo Peng 0009 | 24 | 3 | 30 eCeLLM: Generalizing Large Language Models for E-commerce from Large-scale, High-quality Instruction Data (2024) Efficiency and Deployment 28 M2: Mixed Models With Preferences, Popularities and Transitions for Next-Basket Recommendation (2023) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation |
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| 17 | Theresia Veronika Rampisela | 24 | 3 | 24 Measuring Individual User Fairness with User Similarity and Effectiveness Disparity (2026) Fairness Metrics and Evaluation 24 Evaluation Measures of Individual Item Fairness for Recommender Systems: A Critical Study (2025) Fairness Metrics and Evaluation |
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| 19 | Chongming Gao | 24 | 3 | 31 Agentic Feedback Loop Modeling Improves Recommendation and User Simulation (2025) User Profile and Persona Modeling 28 On the Theories Behind Hard Negative Sampling for Recommendation (2023) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 20 | Yixin Liu 0001 | 24 | 3 | 27 FreeGAD: A Training-Free yet Effective Approach for Graph Anomaly Detection (2025) Graph Anomaly and Out-of-Distribution Detection 27 PREM: A Simple Yet Effective Approach for Node-Level Graph Anomaly Detection (2023) Graph Anomaly and Out-of-Distribution Detection |
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| 21 | Chen Wang 0052 | 24 | 3 | 33 Ranking-based Group Identification via Factorized Attention on Social Tripartite Graph (2023) Social and Group Recommendation 33 Multi-View Graph Convolution for Participant Recommendation (2023) Social and Group Recommendation |
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| 22 | Fei Sun 0001 | 24 | 3 | 28 XDM: Improving Sequential Deep Matching with Unclicked User Behaviors for Recommender System (2022) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 28 Personalized re-ranking for recommendation (2019) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 23 | Riwei Lai | 24 | 3 | 29 Augmented Negative Sampling for Collaborative Filtering (2023) Negative Sampling and Loss Functions 29 Denoising and Augmented Negative Sampling for Collaborative Filtering (2025) Negative Sampling and Loss Functions |
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| 24 | Yang Zhang 0072 | 24 | 3 | 33 AlpsBench: An LLM Personalization Benchmark for Real-Dialogue Memorization and Preference Alignment (2026) Efficiency and Deployment 30 Preliminary Study on Incremental Learning for Large Language Model-based Recommender Systems (2024) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 25 | Yi Zhang 0103 | 24 | 3 | 61 Bi-Directional Transfer Graph Contrastive Learning for Social Recommendation (2025) Social Media and User Modelling 29 ProEx: A Unified Framework Leveraging Large Language Model with Profile Extrapolation for Recommendation (2026) User Profile and Persona Modeling |
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| 26 | Jizhi Zhang | 24 | 3 | 31 Agentic Feedback Loop Modeling Improves Recommendation and User Simulation (2025) User Profile and Persona Modeling 30 Navigating Large Language Models for Recommendation: From Architecture to Learning Paradigms and Deployment (2025) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 27 | Ching Law | 24 | 3 | 57 Profiling Users from Online Social Behaviors with Applications for Tencent Social Ads (2016) Social Media and User Modelling 31 Think Then Recommend: An LLM-Powered Multi-Agent Framework for Personalized Conversational Recommender System in E-Commerce (2026) Conversational Recommendation Systems |
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| 28 | Shuchang Liu 0001 | 23 | 3 | 28 Comprehensive List Generation for Multi-Generator Reranking (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 27 Modeling User Retention through Generative Flow Networks (2024) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 29 | Zhengyi Yang 0007 | 23 | 3 | 31 Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 31 On Efficiency-Effectiveness Trade-off of Diffusion-based Recommenders (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 30 | Yongjing Hao | 23 | 3 | 28 Considering Interaction Sequence of Historical Items for Conversational Recommender System (2021) Conversational and Interactive Recommendation 28 Tell Me Where to Go Next: Improving POI Recommendation via Conversation (2021) Conversational Recommendation Systems |
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| 31 | Bo Chen 0023 | 23 | 3 | 27 Towards efficient and effective unlearning of large language models for recommendation (2025) Efficiency and Deployment 27 A Comprehensive Survey on Automated Machine Learning for Recommendations (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 34 | Huifeng Guo | 23 | 3 | 29 Prompt Tuning as User Inherent Profile Inference Machine (2025) Efficiency and Deployment 27 Personalize Before Retrieve: LLM-based Personalized Query Expansion for User-Centric Retrieval (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG |
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| 35 | Xiaolong Liu 0012 | 23 | 3 | 30 Ranking-based Group Identification via Factorized Attention on Social Tripartite Graph (2023) Social and Group Graph Recommendation 29 Dimension Independent Mixup for Hard Negative Sample in Collaborative Filtering (2023) Negative Sampling and Loss Functions |