Certainly Bot Or Not? Trustworthy Social Bot Detection via Robust Multi-Modal Neural Processes

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wu, Qi, Yang, Yingguang, liu, hao, Peng, Hao, He, Buyun, Xia, Yutong, Liao, Yong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Wu, Qi
Yang, Yingguang
liu, hao
Peng, Hao
He, Buyun
Xia, Yutong
Liao, Yong
author_facet Wu, Qi
Yang, Yingguang
liu, hao
Peng, Hao
He, Buyun
Xia, Yutong
Liao, Yong
contents Social bot detection is crucial for mitigating misinformation, online manipulation, and coordinated inauthentic behavior. While existing neural network-based detectors perform well on benchmarks, they struggle with generalization due to distribution shifts across datasets and frequently produce overconfident predictions for out-of-distribution accounts beyond the training data. To address this, we introduce a novel Uncertainty Estimation for Social Bot Detection (UESBD) framework, which quantifies the predictive uncertainty of detectors beyond mere classification. For this task, we propose Robust Multi-modal Neural Processes (RMNP), which aims to enhance the robustness of multi-modal neural processes to modality inconsistencies caused by social bot camouflage. RMNP first learns unimodal representations through modality-specific encoders. Then, unimodal attentive neural processes are employed to encode the Gaussian distribution of unimodal latent variables. Furthermore, to avoid social bots stealing human features to camouflage themselves thus causing certain modalities to provide conflictive information, we introduce an evidential gating network to explicitly model the reliability of modalities. The joint latent distribution is learned through the generalized product of experts, which takes the reliability of each modality into consideration during fusion. The final prediction is obtained through Monte Carlo sampling of the joint latent distribution followed by a decoder. Experiments on three real-world benchmarks show the effectiveness of RMNP in classification and uncertainty estimation, as well as its robustness to modality conflicts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_09626
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Certainly Bot Or Not? Trustworthy Social Bot Detection via Robust Multi-Modal Neural Processes
Wu, Qi
Yang, Yingguang
liu, hao
Peng, Hao
He, Buyun
Xia, Yutong
Liao, Yong
Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Social bot detection is crucial for mitigating misinformation, online manipulation, and coordinated inauthentic behavior. While existing neural network-based detectors perform well on benchmarks, they struggle with generalization due to distribution shifts across datasets and frequently produce overconfident predictions for out-of-distribution accounts beyond the training data. To address this, we introduce a novel Uncertainty Estimation for Social Bot Detection (UESBD) framework, which quantifies the predictive uncertainty of detectors beyond mere classification. For this task, we propose Robust Multi-modal Neural Processes (RMNP), which aims to enhance the robustness of multi-modal neural processes to modality inconsistencies caused by social bot camouflage. RMNP first learns unimodal representations through modality-specific encoders. Then, unimodal attentive neural processes are employed to encode the Gaussian distribution of unimodal latent variables. Furthermore, to avoid social bots stealing human features to camouflage themselves thus causing certain modalities to provide conflictive information, we introduce an evidential gating network to explicitly model the reliability of modalities. The joint latent distribution is learned through the generalized product of experts, which takes the reliability of each modality into consideration during fusion. The final prediction is obtained through Monte Carlo sampling of the joint latent distribution followed by a decoder. Experiments on three real-world benchmarks show the effectiveness of RMNP in classification and uncertainty estimation, as well as its robustness to modality conflicts.
title Certainly Bot Or Not? Trustworthy Social Bot Detection via Robust Multi-Modal Neural Processes
topic Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09626