Multi-Signal Fusion of Social Diffusion Graph with Bi-Directional Semantic Consistency

Devising diffusion graph to learn user representations is a crucial step in studying information propagation prediction. However, previous works mainly focused on structural and temporal features. To better incorporate content features, we introduce the Backward Decomposition and Forward Preservation mechanisms. The former involves decomposing content features for initializing node signals in the diffusion graph, thus fusing user features with content features. The latter aims to maintain node features generated by graph encoder consistent with the original content features. A series of experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models, and both mechanisms significantly enhance the prediction performance. Furthermore, our methods enables the features generated by the diffusion graph to more effectively incorporate features from various semantic spaces, whether encoded by language models or generated by graph embedding algorithms.