SP-GCRL: Influence Maximization on Incomplete Social Graphs
For practitioners deploying influence campaigns on real-world platforms with noisy and incomplete graph data, SP-GCRL provides a robust and scalable solution.
SP-GCRL addresses influence maximization on incomplete social graphs by learning an end-to-end seed selection policy under partial observability, achieving significant gains over baselines across budgets and topologies while maintaining large-scale scalability.
Influence maximization (IM) in real platforms is challenged by incomplete, noisy social graphs and non-stationary diffusion dynamics. We propose SP-GCRL, a social-propagation-aware graph contrastive reinforcement learning framework that learns end-to-end seed selection under partial observability.We first introduce a social-propagation-aware nonlinear diffusion function to model reinforcement/diminishing effects and probability drift under repeated exposure; we then construct dual structural views and perform contrastive learning to obtain node representations robust to missing edges and weak ties, while replacing expensive strategy metrics with a GAT-based regression surrogate to improve efficiency and scalability; finally, we use DDQN to learn an end-to-end seed selection policy on top of these representations. Experiments on multiple real-world networks show that SP-GCRL achieves significant gains over heuristic and learning-based baselines across budgets and topologies, while maintaining strong large-scale scalability.