CCGL: Contrastive Cascade Graph Learning

TL;DR

CCGL introduces a self-supervised, contrastive learning framework for information cascade graph modeling that enhances transferability and reduces reliance on labeled data, outperforming traditional supervised methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel contrastive self-supervised learning framework for cascade graphs, including data augmentation, pre-training, fine-tuning, and distillation for transferability.

Findings

CCGL outperforms supervised models on downstream tasks.

The framework effectively captures variation in cascade data.

CCGL enhances transferability across datasets and applications.

Abstract

Supervised learning, while prevalent for information cascade modeling, often requires abundant labeled data in training, and the trained model is not easy to generalize across tasks and datasets. It often learns task-specific representations, which can easily result in overfitting for downstream tasks. Recently, self-supervised learning is designed to alleviate these two fundamental issues in linguistic and visual tasks. However, its direct applicability for information cascade modeling, especially graph cascade related tasks, remains underexplored. In this work, we present Contrastive Cascade Graph Learning (CCGL), a novel framework for information cascade graph learning in a contrastive, self-supervised, and task-agnostic way. In particular, CCGL first designs an effective data augmentation strategy to capture variation and uncertainty by simulating the information diffusion in graphs. Second, it learns a generic model for graph cascade tasks via self-supervised contrastive pre-training using both unlabeled and labeled data. Third, CCGL learns a task-specific cascade model via fine-tuning using labeled data. Finally, to make the model transferable across datasets and cascade applications, CCGL further enhances the model via distillation using a teacher-student architecture. We demonstrate that CCGL significantly outperforms its supervised and semi-supervised counterparts for several downstream tasks.