DiffIM: Differentiable Influence Minimization with Surrogate Modeling and Continuous Relaxation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Lee, Junghun, Kim, Hyunju, Bu, Fanchen, Ko, Jihoon, Shin, Kijung
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Lee, Junghun
Kim, Hyunju
Bu, Fanchen
Ko, Jihoon
Shin, Kijung
author_facet Lee, Junghun
Kim, Hyunju
Bu, Fanchen
Ko, Jihoon
Shin, Kijung
contents In social networks, people influence each other through social links, which can be represented as propagation among nodes in graphs. Influence minimization (IMIN) is the problem of manipulating the structures of an input graph (e.g., removing edges) to reduce the propagation among nodes. IMIN can represent time-critical real-world applications, such as rumor blocking, but IMIN is theoretically difficult and computationally expensive. Moreover, the discrete nature of IMIN hinders the usage of powerful machine learning techniques, which requires differentiable computation. In this work, we propose DiffIM, a novel method for IMIN with two differentiable schemes for acceleration: (1) surrogate modeling for efficient influence estimation, which avoids time-consuming simulations (e.g., Monte Carlo), and (2) the continuous relaxation of decisions, which avoids the evaluation of individual discrete decisions (e.g., removing an edge). We further propose a third accelerating scheme, gradient-driven selection, that chooses edges instantly based on gradients without optimization (spec., gradient descent iterations) on each test instance. Through extensive experiments on real-world graphs, we show that each proposed scheme significantly improves speed with little (or even no) IMIN performance degradation. Our method is Pareto-optimal (i.e., no baseline is faster and more effective than it) and typically several orders of magnitude (spec., up to 15,160X) faster than the most effective baseline while being more effective.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_01031
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DiffIM: Differentiable Influence Minimization with Surrogate Modeling and Continuous Relaxation
Lee, Junghun
Kim, Hyunju
Bu, Fanchen
Ko, Jihoon
Shin, Kijung
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
In social networks, people influence each other through social links, which can be represented as propagation among nodes in graphs. Influence minimization (IMIN) is the problem of manipulating the structures of an input graph (e.g., removing edges) to reduce the propagation among nodes. IMIN can represent time-critical real-world applications, such as rumor blocking, but IMIN is theoretically difficult and computationally expensive. Moreover, the discrete nature of IMIN hinders the usage of powerful machine learning techniques, which requires differentiable computation. In this work, we propose DiffIM, a novel method for IMIN with two differentiable schemes for acceleration: (1) surrogate modeling for efficient influence estimation, which avoids time-consuming simulations (e.g., Monte Carlo), and (2) the continuous relaxation of decisions, which avoids the evaluation of individual discrete decisions (e.g., removing an edge). We further propose a third accelerating scheme, gradient-driven selection, that chooses edges instantly based on gradients without optimization (spec., gradient descent iterations) on each test instance. Through extensive experiments on real-world graphs, we show that each proposed scheme significantly improves speed with little (or even no) IMIN performance degradation. Our method is Pareto-optimal (i.e., no baseline is faster and more effective than it) and typically several orders of magnitude (spec., up to 15,160X) faster than the most effective baseline while being more effective.
title DiffIM: Differentiable Influence Minimization with Surrogate Modeling and Continuous Relaxation
topic Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01031