Modeling Image Virality with Pairwise Spatial Transformer Networks
This work addresses the challenge of understanding and predicting virality for images in online social networks, which is important for researchers and practitioners in computational social sciences and computer vision, though it appears incremental as it builds on prior attribute prediction methods.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting image virality on online media by reformulating it as a pairwise attribute prediction task, resulting in a model that surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods by a 12% average improvement in prediction accuracy.
The study of virality and information diffusion online is a topic gaining traction rapidly in the computational social sciences. Computer vision and social network analysis research have also focused on understanding the impact of content and information diffusion in making content viral, with prior approaches not performing significantly well as other traditional classification tasks. In this paper, we present a novel pairwise reformulation of the virality prediction problem as an attribute prediction task and develop a novel algorithm to model image virality on online media using a pairwise neural network. Our model provides significant insights into the features that are responsible for promoting virality and surpasses the existing state-of-the-art by a 12% average improvement in prediction. We also investigate the effect of external category supervision on relative attribute prediction and observe an increase in prediction accuracy for the same across several attribute learning datasets.