Message Propagation Research Articles

Node Importance Estimation for Knowledge Graphs Based on Multi-Perspectives Attention Fusion Mechanism

The advent of the Internet has led to the emergence of multi-source heterogeneous knowledge graphs, which have become a crucial means of storing and disseminating knowledge. Node importance estimation is a technique that is employed extensively in a number of fields, including recommender systems, intelligent search and resource allocation. This study introduces a Multi-perspective attention mechanism Fusion Algorithm for the mapping of multi-perspective features of knowledge graphs to Node Importance Estimation (MFA-NIE). First, structural embedding features, relational predicate features, and attribute features (both textual and quantitative) are established for the nodes. Subsequently, an enhanced attention mechanism is employed to extract, compress, and fuse these features. The fused hidden layer vector is employed in the design of a key-based attention mechanism, which enables the propagation of messages from neighboring nodes to the source node. This process results in the iterative updating of the source node’s hidden features. Finally, TOPSIS centrality, based on the topology of the source node, is employed to dynamically adjust the mapping between the fused features and node importance. Experiments were conducted on real-world, large-scale, multi-source, heterogeneous knowledge graphs, comparing the MFA-NIE algorithm with traditional and advanced baseline algorithms, including PR, PPR, GENI, RGTN, CLINE, MCRL, and others. The results demonstrate that the MFA-NIE algorithm significantly improves effectiveness and accuracy, showcasing its superiority, versatility, and practical application value.

Maximizing the spread of information through content optimization

As data-driven prediction models advance, an increasing number of people are enjoying news personalized to their interests. The primary problem such recommendation models solve is to precisely match information with users and, in so doing, ensure that news spreads with greater efficiency. However, these techniques only help the media platform; they do not help those who produce the news. Hence, we devised a propagation framework based on a human-in-the-loop simulation that helps content authors maximize the spread of their messages through social networks. The framework works by acting on feedback provided by the simulation model. Additionally, the spread of information is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem in which propagation is data-driven and simulated with machine learning techniques that leverage data on the historical behaviors of users. We additionally describe an implementation for this framework as an example of how the framework might be used in real life. On the practical side, the implementation uses text data from a blog to simulate the message's propagation, while, from a technical point of view, the multi-objective optimization problem is divided into an information retrieval problem and an integer programming problem, the results of which are fed back into the content editor as content operation strategies. A case study with the Sina Weibo microblog site not only validates the framework but also provides practitioners with insights into how to maximize the spread of information through social networking platforms. The results show that the proposed propagation framework is capable of increasing retweets by 7.9575 %. As an interesting aside, our experiments also show that the Weibo retweet lottery is both popular and a highly effective mechanism for increasing reposts.

A Mathematical Formulation and Heuristic for the Message Propagation Problem in Connected Directed Graph

A Mathematical Formulation and Heuristic for the Message Propagation Problem in Connected Directed Graph

Domination based graph neural networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a widely used and effective method across various domains for learning from graph data. Despite the abundance of GNN variants, many struggle with effectively propagating messages over long distances. This paper introduces a novel hierarchical message passing framework for graph learning, specifically designed to address the challenge of long-distance message propagation in graphs. By constructing smaller graphs from the main graph using the concept of domination, a fundamental principle in graph theory, we facilitate more efficient message passing within each subgraph. Subsequently, we employ a Graph Attention Network (GAT) to aggregate these features and propagate them to distant nodes across the graph. Experimental results on standard node classification datasets validate that the proposed architecture achieves performance comparable to or better than conventional GNNs. Additionally, our model consistently performs better on graphs with missing edges.

The Effects of Social Approval Signals on the Production of Online Hate: A Theoretical Explication

This essay explicates a middle range theory to predict and explain the propagation and magnification of hate messages on social media. It builds upon an assumption that people post hate messages in order to garner signals of social approval from other social media users. It articulates specific propositions involving several constructs, including signals of social approval, disapproval, and sufficiency of social approval. Six derived hypotheses predict how these dynamics apply in certain contexts of social media interaction involving hate posting. It reviews empirical research that applies to these hypotheses, raises issues for future research, and reviews concurrence and distinctions between this approach and other theories.

Zebra: A cluster-aware blockchain consensus algorithm

The Consensus algorithm is the core of the permissioned blockchain, it directly affects the performance and scalability of the system. Performance is limited by the computing power and network bandwidth of a single leader node. Most existing blockchain systems adopt mesh or star topology. Blockchain performance decreases rapidly as the number of nodes increases. To solve this problem, we first design the n-k cluster tree and corresponding generation algorithm, which supports rapid reconfiguration of nodes. Then we propose the Zebra consensus algorithm, which is a cluster tree-based consensus algorithm. Compared to the PBFT, it has higher throughput and supports more nodes under the same hardware conditions. However, the tree network topology enhances scalability while also increasing latency among nodes. To reduce transaction latency, we designed the Pipeline-Zebra consensus algorithm that further improves the performance of blockchain systems in a tree network topology through parallel message propagation and block validation. The message complexity of the algorithm is O(n). Experimental results show that the performance of the algorithm proposed in this paper can reach 2.25 times that of the PBFT algorithm, and it supports four times the number of nodes under the same hardware.

Identification of microbe–disease signed associations via multi-scale variational graph autoencoder based on signed message propagation

BackgroundPlenty of clinical and biomedical research has unequivocally highlighted the tremendous significance of the human microbiome in relation to human health. Identifying microbes associated with diseases is crucial for early disease diagnosis and advancing precision medicine.ResultsConsidering that the information about changes in microbial quantities under fine-grained disease states helps to enhance a comprehensive understanding of the overall data distribution, this study introduces MSignVGAE, a framework for predicting microbe-disease sign associations using signed message propagation. MSignVGAE employs a graph variational autoencoder to model noisy signed association data and extends the multi-scale concept to enhance representation capabilities. A novel strategy for propagating signed message in signed networks addresses heterogeneity and consistency among nodes connected by signed edges. Additionally, we utilize the idea of denoising autoencoder to handle the noise in similarity feature information, which helps overcome biases in the fused similarity data. MSignVGAE represents microbe-disease associations as a heterogeneous graph using similarity information as node features. The multi-class classifier XGBoost is utilized to predict sign associations between diseases and microbes.ConclusionsMSignVGAE achieves AUROC and AUPR values of 0.9742 and 0.9601, respectively. Case studies on three diseases demonstrate that MSignVGAE can effectively capture a comprehensive distribution of associations by leveraging signed information.

Mapping Word-of-Mouth Pathways: Tie Strength and Contextual Reference Considerations

This qualitative study explores "Mapping Word-of-Mouth Pathways: Tie Strength and Contextual Reference Considerations" with the aim of understanding the dynamics of word-of-mouth (WOM) communication. The research model investigates the influence of tie strength and contextual references on the propagation of WOM messages. A purposive sampling technique was employed to select participants representing diverse social networks and contexts. Data analysis involved thematic analysis to identify patterns and themes in the qualitative data. The findings reveal that tie strength plays a significant role in shaping the direction and intensity of WOM exchanges, with strong ties facilitating more direct and impactful communication. Contextual references, including situational factors and target group characteristics, also influence WOM pathways, guiding the dissemination of messages. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of WOM dynamics and provides insights for marketers and communicators seeking to leverage WOM effectively.

Improving Graph Collaborative Filtering with Directional Behavior Enhanced Contrastive Learning

Graph Collaborative Filtering is a widely adopted approach for recommendation, which captures similar behavior features through Graph Neural Network (GNN). Recently, Contrastive Learning (CL) has been demonstrated as an effective method to enhance the performance of graph collaborative filtering. Typically, CL-based methods first perturb users’ history behavior data (e.g., drop clicked items), then construct a self-discriminating task for behavior representations under different random perturbations. However, for widely existing inactive users, random perturbation makes their sparse behavior information more incomplete, thereby harming the behavior feature extraction. To tackle the above issue, we design a novel directional perturbation-based CL method to improve the graph collaborative filtering performance. The idea is to perturb node representations through directionally enhancing behavior features. To do so, we propose a simple yet effective feedback mechanism, which fuses the representations of nodes based on behavior similarity. Then, to avoid irrelevant behavior preferences introduced by the feedback mechanism, we construct a behavior self-contrast task before and after feedback, to align the node representations between the final output and the first layer of GNN. Different from the widely adopted self-discriminating task, the behavior self-contrast task avoids complex message propagation on different perturbed graphs, which is more efficient than previous methods. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method has distinct advantages over other CL methods on recommendation accuracy.

SAIRIgRg: A rumor-debunking propagation model considering credibility factor in large-scale rumor spreading

In this study, we collected and processed Weibo posts from official debunking accounts and found that user-following relationships can influence the dynamics of message propagation. Building upon the Susceptible, Aware, Infected, Recovered (SAIR) model with memory decay and user reinforcement, we develop the SAIRIgRg model to address the practical scenario of government debunking in the context of large-scale rumor spreading, considering the credibility factor. Through simulations on a real-world Twitter-directed network dataset, where different nodes with varying in-degree and out-degree sizes were chosen as debunking nodes, we analyzed the spread of rumors and debunking information. We discovered that there is little correlation between the initial in-degree and out-degree sizes of nodes and the effectiveness of debunking dissemination. Nodes with smaller average path lengths may not effectively suppress rumors through debunking efforts. Conversely, when debunking is conducted on nodes with larger average path lengths, the higher credibility of debunking messages leads to stronger suppression of rumors and shorter lifespans for the rumors. Additionally, this study conducted a comparison between early and late official debunking. It was discovered that when the spreading of rumors reaches a certain size and intensity, even though early debunking may not influence the lifespan of the rumors, it can greatly reduce the number of users affected by the rumors.

Approaching Electroencephalographic Pathological Spikes in Terms of Solitons

A delicate balance between dissipative and nonlinear forces allows traveling waves termed solitons to preserve their shape and energy for long distances without steepening and flattening out. Solitons are so widespread that they can generate both destructive waves on oceans’ surfaces and noise-free message propagation in silica optic fibers. They are naturally observed or artificially produced in countless physical systems at very different coarse-grained scales, from solar winds to Bose–Einstein condensates. We hypothesize that some of the electric oscillations detectable by scalp electroencephalography (EEG) could be assessed in terms of solitons. A nervous spike must fulfill strict mathematical and physical requirements to be termed a soliton. They include the proper physical parameters like wave height, horizontal distance and unchanging shape; the appropriate nonlinear wave equations’ solutions and the correct superposition between sinusoidal and non-sinusoidal waves. After a thorough analytical comparison with the EEG traces available in the literature, we argue that solitons bear striking similarities with the electric activity recorded from medical conditions like epilepsies and encephalopathies. Emerging from the noisy background of the normal electric activity, high-amplitude, low-frequency EEG soliton-like pathological waves with relatively uniform morphology and duration can be observed, characterized by repeated, stereotyped patterns propagating on the hemispheric surface of the brain over relatively large distances. Apart from the implications for the study of cognitive activities in the healthy brain, the theoretical possibility to treat pathological brain oscillations in terms of solitons has powerful operational implications, suggesting new therapeutical options to counteract their detrimental effects.

OGNNMDA: a computational model for microbe-drug association prediction based on ordered message-passing graph neural networks.

In recent years, many excellent computational models have emerged in microbe-drug association prediction, but their performance still has room for improvement. This paper proposed the OGNNMDA framework, which applied an ordered message-passing mechanism to distinguish the different neighbor information in each message propagation layer, and it achieved a better embedding ability through deeper network layers. Firstly, the method calculates four similarity matrices based on microbe functional similarity, drug chemical structure similarity, and their respective Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity. After integrating these similarity matrices, it concatenates the integrated similarity matrix with the known association matrix to obtain the microbe-drug heterogeneous matrix. Secondly, it uses a multi-layer ordered message-passing graph neural network encoder to encode the heterogeneous network and the known association information adjacency matrix, thereby obtaining the final embedding features of the microbe-drugs. Finally, it inputs the embedding features into the bilinear decoder to get the final prediction results. The OGNNMDA method performed comparative experiments, ablation experiments, and case studies on the aBiofilm, MDAD and DrugVirus datasets using 5-fold cross-validation. The experimental results showed that OGNNMDA showed the strongest prediction performance on aBiofilm and MDAD and obtained sub-optimal results on DrugVirus. In addition, the case studies on well-known drugs and microbes also support the effectiveness of the OGNNMDA method. Source codes and data are available at: https://github.com/yyzg/OGNNMDA.

Messages are Never Propagated Alone: Collaborative Hypergraph Neural Network for Time-Series Forecasting.

This paper delves into the problem of correlated time-series forecasting in practical applications, an area of growing interest in a multitude of fields such as stock price prediction and traffic demand analysis. Current methodologies primarily represent data using conventional graph structures, yet these fail to capture intricate structures with non-pairwise relationships. To address this challenge, we adopt dynamic hypergraphs in this study to better illustrate complex interactions, and introduce a novel hypergraph neural network model named CHNN for correlated time series forecasting. In more detail, CHNN leverages both semantic and topological similarities via an interaction model and hypergraph diffusion process, thereby constructing comprehensive collaborative correlation scores that effectively guide spatial message propagation. In addition, it incorporates short-term temporal information to generate efficient spatio-temporal feature maps. Lastly, a long-term temporal module is proposed to generate future predictions utilizing both temporal attention and a gated recurrent network. Comprehensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets, i.e., Tiingo, Stocktwits, NYC-Taxi, and Social Network demonstrate that the proposed CHNN markedly outperforms a range of benchmark methods.

MS-BACL: enhancing metabolic stability prediction through bond graph augmentation and contrastive learning.

Accurately predicting molecular metabolic stability is of great significance to drug research and development, ensuring drug safety and effectiveness. Existing deep learning methods, especially graph neural networks, can reveal the molecular structure of drugs and thus efficiently predict the metabolic stability of molecules. However, most of these methods focus on the message passing between adjacent atoms in the molecular graph, ignoring the relationship between bonds. This makes it difficult for these methods to estimate accurate molecular representations, thereby being limited in molecular metabolic stability prediction tasks. We propose the MS-BACL model based on bond graph augmentation technology and contrastive learning strategy, which can efficiently and reliably predict the metabolic stability of molecules. To our knowledge, this is the first time that bond-to-bond relationships in molecular graph structures have been considered in the task of metabolic stability prediction. We build a bond graph based on 'atom-bond-atom', and the model can simultaneously capture the information of atoms and bonds during the message propagation process. This enhances the model's ability to reveal the internal structure of the molecule, thereby improving the structural representation of the molecule. Furthermore, we perform contrastive learning training based on the molecular graph and its bond graph to learn the final molecular representation. Multiple sets of experimental results on public datasets show that the proposed MS-BACL model outperforms the state-of-the-art model. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/taowang11/MS.

WaveNet: Tackling Non-stationary Graph Signals via Graph Spectral Wavelets

In the existing spectral GNNs, polynomial-based methods occupy the mainstream in designing a filter through the Laplacian matrix. However, polynomial combinations factored by the Laplacian matrix naturally have limitations in message passing (e.g., over-smoothing). Furthermore, most existing spectral GNNs are based on polynomial bases, which struggle to capture the high-frequency parts of the graph spectral signal. Additionally, we also find that even increasing the polynomial order does not change this situation, which means polynomial-based models have a natural deficiency when facing high-frequency signals. To tackle these problems, we propose WaveNet, which aims to effectively capture the high-frequency part of the graph spectral signal from the perspective of wavelet bases through reconstructing the message propagation matrix. We utilize Multi-Resolution Analysis (MRA) to model this question, and our proposed method can reconstruct arbitrary filters theoretically. We also conduct node classification experiments on real-world graph benchmarks and achieve superior performance on most datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/Bufordyang/WaveNet

Propaganda channels and their comparative effectiveness: The case of Russia’s war in Ukraine

Since Lasswell, propaganda has been considered one of three chief implements of warfare, along with military and economic pressure. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revives public and scholarly interest in war propaganda. The Russian political leader frames the war as an imperial war. The Ukrainian political leader frames it as a war of national liberation. The discursive battle thus complements the military combat. The outcome of the discursive combat depends on the effectiveness of propaganda deployed by the parties involved. Propaganda effectiveness is the propagation of war-related messages stated by political leaders through various media with no or few distortions. The effectiveness of propaganda is compared (1) across countries, with a particular focus on two belligerents, Russia and Ukraine, (2) in the function of the medium (mass media, digital media), and (iii) using two different methods (content analysis and survey research). Data were collected during the first year of the large-scale invasion (February 2022 to February 2023). Survey data allowed measuring the degree of the target audience’s agreement with key propagated messages.

A heterogeneous 3-D stacked PIM accelerator for GCN-based recommender systems

AbstractModern recommendation systems integrate graph convolution neural networks (GCN) for enhancing embedding representation. Compared with widely deployed neural network-based models, the extra message propagation layer of GCN-based recommendation is featured with extensive computations and irregular memory access. However, architecture designs for prevailing deep neural network recommendation models assume simple pooling in the embedding layer. ReRAM-based GCN accelerators are specialized for graph-related operations. However, they are designed for general graphs, while GCN-based recommendation models mainly operate on the user-item graph. In this paper, we proposed a resistive random accessed memory (ReRAM) based processing-in-memory (PIM) accelerator, ReGCNR, for GCN-based recommendation. ReGCNR is featured with three key innovations. First, we exploit the 3-dimensional (3-D) stacked heterogeneous ReRAM to fit with the large-size embedding table and user-item graph. Then, we propose a joint degree mapping schema that maximizes the efficiency of the execution pipeline. After that, ReGCNR assembles a well-coordinated pipeline and hardware scheduling design to boost overall system performance. Results show that ReGCNR outperforms GPU by 69.83$$\times$$ × and 56.67$$\times$$ × in terms of average speedup and energy saving, respectively. In addition, ReGCNR outperforms state-of-the-art ReRAM-based solutions by 11.13$$\times$$ × speedups and 7.22$$\times$$ × energy savings on average.

Mobile Handoff with 6LoWPAN Neighbour Discovery Auxiliary Communication

The importance of the topic under investigation stems from the burgeoning prominence of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm and the consequent imperative to devise and institute an efficacious methodology for neighbour detection that facilitates supplementary connections to mobile nodes. This research primarily aims to elucidate a mobile handover technique aligning with the neighbour discovery paradigm inherent in 6LoWPAN. The methodological framework employed herein amalgamates a systematic analysis of the foundational tenets governing 6LoWPAN communication standards over the IPv6 protocol in the context of IEEE 802.15.4aa personal wireless networks, supplemented with empirical evaluation of message propagation dynamics among discrete nodes of a designated personal wireless network. The findings of this investigation underscore the pre-eminence of the 6LoWPAN networking standard as a prime vehicle for bolstering the dependable communication of IoT's remote entities, contingent upon the utilization of the IPv6 communication protocol. This iteration of the Internet protocol is superior, particularly in surveillance contexts, given its expansive address capacity (128 bits) juxtaposed against its antecedent, the IPv4 protocol (32 bits). The inherent adaptability of this network connection augments the quality of mobile handover, especially when one considers the real-world application of 6LoWPAN's neighbour discovery auxiliary communication standard. The tangible implications of these findings beckon their potential utility in satiating the demands of IoT system users and actualizing the network collaboration ethos intrinsic to the 6LoWPAN communication standard. 

Coupled dynamics of information propagation and emotion influence: Emerging emotion clusters for public health emergency messages on the Chinese Sina Microblog

A major distinction between the COVID-19 pandemic and previous pandemics is the significant role of social media platforms in shaping public adherence to non-pharmaceutical interventions and vaccine acceptance. The information propagation and individual emotion communication relevant to public health messages have been promoted in the Chinese Sina Microblog, one of the most popular social platforms in China, through two major interaction mechanisms, “commenting” and “forwarding”. Here, we develop a hybrid system of macro information propagation dynamics Susceptible-Commenting-Forwarding-Immune model coupled with the micro emotion influence dynamics Hegselmann-Krause model, termed HK-SCFI coupled system, and reveal the mechanisms of individual emotion infection using the commenting and forwarding data (including time point and content) publicly available on public opinion events in the Chinese Sina Microblog. We demonstrate how our data-driven and model-informed analysis can provide quantitative insights into the co-evolution mechanism of individual emotion during information propagation, describe the emergency of emotion clusters, and predict individual emotion evolution trends. Our study shows that multiple interactive mechanisms can facilitate the propagation of public messages and shape public sentiment through online social networks. Our modeling framework can potentially be a tool for designing effective propagation strategies during public health emergencies.

Weighted omnidirectional semi-global stereo matching

Traditional semi-global matching (SGM) lacks interaction between scanlines and struggles to deal with the ambiguity of pixels in homogenous areas. In this paper, we propose a novel path-centering graph to perform weighted omnidirectional SGM (WOdSGM), in which the input image is divided into eight sub-trees, corresponding to eight optimization directions. In each pass, the outputs of pixels are recursively computed from leaf nodes to the root node along the tree structure. As the results of SGM from multiple scanlines often show different biases owing to respective message propagation directions, one solution is accurate in certain areas while others are not. By delving into the distribution of aggregated costs for pixels from various structures, we find that the minimum cost of reliable output is heavily biased from others. Therefore, we perform line fitting to approximate the distribution of aggregated costs and use the distance between the fitted line and the point corresponding to the minimum cost to evaluate the reliability of aggregated costs. Furthermore, we present a weighted fusion strategy to incorporate outputs from multiple directions, enabling our method to provide directionally biased constraints. Extensive experiments and analyses on widely used stereo datasets show that our approach outperforms typical traditional SGM-based algorithms.