Propagation Tree Is Not Deep: Adaptive Graph Contrastive Learning Approach for Rumor Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cui, Chaoqun, Jia, Caiyan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cui, Chaoqun
Jia, Caiyan
author_facet Cui, Chaoqun
Jia, Caiyan
contents Rumor detection on social media has become increasingly important. Most existing graph-based models presume rumor propagation trees (RPTs) have deep structures and learn sequential stance features along branches. However, through statistical analysis on real-world datasets, we find RPTs exhibit wide structures, with most nodes being shallow 1-level replies. To focus learning on intensive substructures, we propose Rumor Adaptive Graph Contrastive Learning (RAGCL) method with adaptive view augmentation guided by node centralities. We summarize three principles for RPT augmentation: 1) exempt root nodes, 2) retain deep reply nodes, 3) preserve lower-level nodes in deep sections. We employ node dropping, attribute masking and edge dropping with probabilities from centrality-based importance scores to generate views. A graph contrastive objective then learns robust rumor representations. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate RAGCL outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our work reveals the wide-structure nature of RPTs and contributes an effective graph contrastive learning approach tailored for rumor detection through principled adaptive augmentation. The proposed principles and augmentation techniques can potentially benefit other applications involving tree-structured graphs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_07201
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Propagation Tree Is Not Deep: Adaptive Graph Contrastive Learning Approach for Rumor Detection
Cui, Chaoqun
Jia, Caiyan
Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Rumor detection on social media has become increasingly important. Most existing graph-based models presume rumor propagation trees (RPTs) have deep structures and learn sequential stance features along branches. However, through statistical analysis on real-world datasets, we find RPTs exhibit wide structures, with most nodes being shallow 1-level replies. To focus learning on intensive substructures, we propose Rumor Adaptive Graph Contrastive Learning (RAGCL) method with adaptive view augmentation guided by node centralities. We summarize three principles for RPT augmentation: 1) exempt root nodes, 2) retain deep reply nodes, 3) preserve lower-level nodes in deep sections. We employ node dropping, attribute masking and edge dropping with probabilities from centrality-based importance scores to generate views. A graph contrastive objective then learns robust rumor representations. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate RAGCL outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our work reveals the wide-structure nature of RPTs and contributes an effective graph contrastive learning approach tailored for rumor detection through principled adaptive augmentation. The proposed principles and augmentation techniques can potentially benefit other applications involving tree-structured graphs.
title Propagation Tree Is Not Deep: Adaptive Graph Contrastive Learning Approach for Rumor Detection
topic Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07201