Zhizhen Zhang

Zhizhen Zhang, Xiaohui Xie, Mengyu Yang et al.

Social Media Popularity Prediction has drawn a lot of attention because of its profound impact on many different applications, such as recommendation systems and multimedia advertising. Despite recent efforts to leverage the content of social media posts to improve prediction accuracy, many existing models fail to fully exploit the multiple dependencies between posts, which are important to comprehensively extract content information from posts. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel prediction framework named Dependency-aware Sequence Network (DSN) that exploits both intra- and inter-post dependencies. For intra-post dependency, DSN adopts a multimodal feature extractor with an efficient fine-tuning strategy to obtain task-specific representations from images and textual information of posts. For inter-post dependency, DSN uses a hierarchical information propagation method to learn category representations that could better describe the difference between posts. DSN also exploits recurrent networks with a series of gating layers for more flexible local temporal processing abilities and multi-head attention for long-term dependencies. The experimental results on the Social Media Popularity Dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to existing state-of-the-art models.

Zhizhen Zhang, Xiaohui Xie, Yishuo Zhang et al.

Information cascade popularity prediction is critical for many applications, including but not limited to identifying fake news and accurate recommendations. Traditional feature-based methods heavily rely on handcrafted features, which are domain-specific and lack generalizability to new domains. To address this problem, researchers have turned to neural network-based approaches. However, most existing methods follow a sampling-based modeling approach, potentially losing continuous dynamic information that emerges during the information diffusion process. In this paper, we propose Hierarchical Temporal Graph Attention Networks for cascade popularity prediction (HierCas), which operates on the entire cascade graph by a dynamic graph modeling approach. By leveraging time-aware node embedding, graph attention mechanisms, and hierarchical pooling structures, HierCas effectively captures the popularity trend implicit in the complex cascade. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets in different scenarios demonstrate that our HierCas significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. We have released our code at https://github.com/Daisy-zzz/HierCas.

Zhizhen Zhang, Ruihong Qiu, Xiaohui Xie

On social media sharing platforms, some posts are inherently destined for popularity. Therefore, understanding the reasons behind this phenomenon and predicting popularity before post publication holds significant practical value. The previous work predominantly focuses on enhancing post content extraction for better prediction results. However, certain factors introduced by social platforms also impact post popularity, which has not been extensively studied. For instance, users are more likely to engage with posts from individuals they follow, potentially influencing the popularity of these posts. We term these factors, unrelated to the explicit attractiveness of content, as implicit social factors. Through the analysis of users' post browsing behavior (also validated in public datasets), we propose three implicit social factors related to popularity, including content relevance, user influence similarity, and user identity. To model the proposed social factors, we introduce three supervised contrastive learning tasks. For different task objectives and data types, we assign them to different encoders and control their gradient flows to achieve joint optimization. We also design corresponding sampling and augmentation algorithms to improve the effectiveness of contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on the Social Media Popularity Dataset validate the superiority of our proposed method and also confirm the important role of implicit social factors in popularity prediction. We open source the code at https://github.com/Daisy-zzz/PPCL.git.

Zhizhen Zhang, Ning Wang, Haojie Li et al.

Semantic location prediction aims to derive meaningful location insights from multimodal social media posts, offering a more contextual understanding of daily activities than using GPS coordinates. This task faces significant challenges due to the noise and modality heterogeneity in "text-image" posts. Existing methods are generally constrained by inadequate feature representations and modal interaction, struggling to effectively reduce noise and modality heterogeneity. To address these challenges, we propose a Similarity-Guided Multimodal Fusion Transformer (SG-MFT) for predicting the semantic locations of users from their multimodal posts. First, we incorporate high-quality text and image representations by utilizing a pre-trained large vision-language model. Then, we devise a Similarity-Guided Interaction Module (SIM) to alleviate modality heterogeneity and noise interference by incorporating both coarse-grained and fine-grained similarity guidance for improving modality interactions. Specifically, we propose a novel similarity-aware feature interpolation attention mechanism at the coarse-grained level, leveraging modality-wise similarity to mitigate heterogeneity and reduce noise within each modality. At the fine-grained level, we utilize a similarity-aware feed-forward block and element-wise similarity to further address the issue of modality heterogeneity. Finally, building upon pre-processed features with minimal noise and modal interference, we devise a Similarity-aware Fusion Module (SFM) to fuse two modalities with a cross-attention mechanism. Comprehensive experimental results clearly demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method.