PopSim: Social Network Simulation for Social Media Popularity Prediction

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Liu, Yijun, Liu, Wu, Gu, Xiaoyan, He, Allen, Wang, Weiping, Zhang, Yongdong
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Liu, Yijun
Liu, Wu
Gu, Xiaoyan
He, Allen
Wang, Weiping
Zhang, Yongdong
author_facet Liu, Yijun
Liu, Wu
Gu, Xiaoyan
He, Allen
Wang, Weiping
Zhang, Yongdong
contents Accurately predicting the popularity of user-generated content (UGC) is essential for advancing social media analytics and recommendation systems. Existing approaches typically follow an inductive paradigm, where researchers train static models on historical data for popularity prediction. However, the UGC propagation is inherently a dynamic process, and static modeling based on historical features fails to capture the complex interactions and nonlinear evolution. In this paper, we propose PopSim, a novel simulation-based paradigm for social media popularity prediction (SMPP). Unlike the inductive paradigm, PopSim leverages the large language models (LLMs)-based multi-agent social network sandbox to simulate UGC propagation dynamics for popularity prediction. Specifically, to effectively model the UGC propagation process in the network, we design a social-mean-field-based agent interaction mechanism, which models the dual-channel and bidirectional individual-population interactions, enhancing agents' global perception and decision-making capabilities. In addition, we propose a multi-source information aggregation module that transforms heterogeneous social metadata into a uniform formulation for LLMs. Finally, propagation dynamics with multimodal information are fused to provide comprehensive popularity prediction. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that SimPop consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, reducing prediction error by an average of 8.82%, offering a new perspective for research on the SMPP task.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_02533
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PopSim: Social Network Simulation for Social Media Popularity Prediction
Liu, Yijun
Liu, Wu
Gu, Xiaoyan
He, Allen
Wang, Weiping
Zhang, Yongdong
Multimedia
Accurately predicting the popularity of user-generated content (UGC) is essential for advancing social media analytics and recommendation systems. Existing approaches typically follow an inductive paradigm, where researchers train static models on historical data for popularity prediction. However, the UGC propagation is inherently a dynamic process, and static modeling based on historical features fails to capture the complex interactions and nonlinear evolution. In this paper, we propose PopSim, a novel simulation-based paradigm for social media popularity prediction (SMPP). Unlike the inductive paradigm, PopSim leverages the large language models (LLMs)-based multi-agent social network sandbox to simulate UGC propagation dynamics for popularity prediction. Specifically, to effectively model the UGC propagation process in the network, we design a social-mean-field-based agent interaction mechanism, which models the dual-channel and bidirectional individual-population interactions, enhancing agents' global perception and decision-making capabilities. In addition, we propose a multi-source information aggregation module that transforms heterogeneous social metadata into a uniform formulation for LLMs. Finally, propagation dynamics with multimodal information are fused to provide comprehensive popularity prediction. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that SimPop consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, reducing prediction error by an average of 8.82%, offering a new perspective for research on the SMPP task.
title PopSim: Social Network Simulation for Social Media Popularity Prediction
topic Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02533