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Dongpeng Hou

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9 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Modeling Trend Dynamics with Variational Neural ODEs for Information Popularity Prediction

Yuchen Wang
Dongpeng Hou
Weikai Jing
Chao Gao
Xianghua Li
Yang Liu

Predicting the future popularity of information in online social networks is a crucial yet challenging task, due to the complex spatiotemporal dynamics underlying information diffusion. Existing methods typically use structural or sequential patterns within the observation window as direct inputs for subsequent popularity prediction. However, most approaches lack the ability to explicitly model the overall trend of popularity up to the prediction time, which leads to limited predictive capability. To address these limitations, we propose VNOIP, a novel method based on variational neural Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) for information popularity prediction. Specifically, VNOIP introduces bidirectional jump ODEs with attention mechanisms to capture long-range dependencies and bidirectional context within cascade sequences. Furthermore, by jointly considering both cascade patterns and overall trend temporal patterns, VNOIP explicitly models the continuous-time dynamics of popularity trend trajectories with variational neural ODEs. Additionally, a knowledge distillation loss is employed to align the evolution of prior and posterior latent variables. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that VNOIP is highly competitive in both prediction accuracy and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

A Generalized Diffusion Framework with Learnable Propagation Dynamics for Source Localization

Dongpeng Hou
Yuchen Wang
Chao Gao
Xianghua Li

Source localization has been widely studied in recent years due to its crucial role in controlling the spread of harmful information. Existing methods only achieve satisfactory performance within a specific propagation model, which restricts their applicability and generalizability across different scenarios. To address this, we propose a Generalized Diffusion Framework for Source Localization (GDFSL), which enhances probabilistic diffusion models to flexibly capture the underlying dynamics of various propagation scenarios. By redefining the forward diffusion process, GDFSL ensures convergence to a real distribution of infected states that accurately represents the targeted dynamics, enabling the model to learn unbiased noise in a self-supervised manner that encodes fine-grained propagation characteristics. A closed-form reverse diffusion process is then derived to trace the propagation back to the source. The process does not rely on an explicit source label term, facilitating direct inference of sources from observed data. Experimental results show that GDFSL outperforms SOTA methods in various propagation models, particularly in scenarios where historical training data is limited or unavailable. The code is available at https: //github. com/cgao-comp/GDFSL.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

A Prior-based Discrete Diffusion Model for Social Graph Generation

Shu Yin
Dongpeng Hou
Lianwei Wu
Xianghua Li
Chao Gao

Graph generation is essential in social network analysis, particularly for modeling information flow and user interactions. However, existing probabilistic diffusion models face challenges when applied to social propagation graphs. The continuous noise does not apply to the discrete nature of graph generation tasks, and the random Gaussian initialization in the reverse process can introduce biases that deviate from real-world propagation patterns. To address these issues, this paper introduces a Prior-based Discrete Diffusion Model (PDDM) for social graph generation. PDDM redefines the forward process as a discrete process for node denoising and edge generation, and the task of the denoising module is transformed into the connection probability learning of node-level tasks. Further, PDDM employs a new starting point of the reverse process by incorporating user similarity as the probability matrix, which can better leverage the social context. These developments mitigate reverse-starting bias and enhance model robustness. Moreover, PDDM integrates lightweight deep graph networks such as GAT, demonstrating both scalability and applicability to graph generation scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on real-world social network datasets demonstrate PDDM’s superiority in terms of the MMD metric and downstream tasks. The code is available at https: //github. com/cgao-comp/PDDM.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Good Advisor for Source Localization: Using Large Language Model to Guide the Source Inference Process

Dongpeng Hou
Wenfei Wei
Chao Gao
Xianghua Li
Zhen Wang

With the rapid development of AI large model technology, large language models (LLMs) provide a new solution for source localization tasks due to the deep linguistic understanding and generation capabilities. However, it is difficult to understand complex propagation patterns and network structures when LLMs are directly applied to source localization, resulting in limited accuracy of source localization. Meanwhile, the high-dimensional embedding of the textual representation introduces significant amounts of redundant features, which also reduces its efficiency in source localization task to some extent. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a multi-modal fusion framework for rumor source localization, namely Contrastive Rumor Source Localization via LLM (CRSLL), based on the idea of contrastive learning. Specifically, the framework constructs propagation embeddings by comprehensively capturing both propagation dynamics and user profile features, adopts a contrastive learning approach to enhance the representation ability of comment embeddings of rumor cascades by differentiating them from non-rumor cascade comments, filters out invalid features through a differentiable masking strategy, and fuses comment modality embeddings with propagation embeddings through an attention mechanism, so as to better capture the multi-modal data interactions. It is worth mentioning that the framework uses LLM as a good ``advisor'' to provide a rich deep semantic representation, which improves the accuracy of rumor source localization. The code is available at https: //github. com/cgao-comp/CRSLL.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Learning Neural Jump Stochastic Differential Equations with Latent Graph for Multivariate Temporal Point Processes

Yuchen Wang
Dongpeng Hou
Chao Gao
Xianghua Li

Multivariate Temporal Point Processes (MTPPs) play an important role in diverse domains such as social networks and finance for predicting event sequence data. In recent years, MTPPs based on Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) and Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs) have demonstrated their strong modeling capabilities. However, these models have yet to thoroughly consider the underlying relationships among different event types to enhance their modeling capacity. Therefore, this paper introduces a method that uses neural SDEs with a jump process guided by the latent graph. Firstly, our proposed method employs multi-dimensional SDEs to capture the dynamics of the intensity function for each event type. Subsequently, a latent graph structure is integrated into the jump process without any encoder, aiming to enhance the modeling and predictive capabilities for MTPPs. Theoretical analysis guarantees the existence and uniqueness of the solution for our proposed method. The experiments conducted on multiple real-world datasets show that our approaches demonstrate significant competitiveness when compared to state-of-the-art neural point processes. Meanwhile, the trainable parameters of the latent graph also improve the model interpretability without any prior knowledge. Our code is available at https: //github. com/cgao-comp/LNJSDE.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

SDMG: Smoothing Your Diffusion Models for Powerful Graph Representation Learning

Junyou Zhu
Langzhou He
Chao Gao 0001
Dongpeng Hou
Zhen Su
Philip S. Yu
Jürgen Kurths
Frank Hellmann

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have recently demonstrated impressive generative capabilities. There is emerging evidence that their sample reconstruction ability can yield meaningful representations for recognition tasks. In this paper, we demonstrate that the objectives underlying generation and representation learning are not perfectly aligned. Through a spectral analysis, we find that minimizing the mean squared error (MSE) between the original graph and its reconstructed counterpart does not necessarily optimize representations for downstream tasks. Instead, focusing on reconstructing a small subset of features, specifically those capturing global information, proves to be more effective for learning powerful representations. Motivated by these insights, we propose a novel framework, the Smooth Diffusion Model for Graphs (SDMG), which introduces a multi-scale smoothing loss and low-frequency information encoders to promote the recovery of global, low-frequency details, while suppressing irrelevant high-frequency noise. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, suggesting a promising direction for advancing diffusion models in graph representation learning.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

DAG-Aware Variational Autoencoder for Social Propagation Graph Generation

Dongpeng Hou
Chao Gao
Xuelong Li
Zhen Wang

Propagation models in social networks are critical, with extensive applications across various fields and downstream tasks. However, existing propagation models are often oversimplified, scenario-specific, and lack real-world user social attributes. These limitations detaching from real-world analysis lead to inaccurate representations of the propagation process in social networks. To address these issues, we propose a User Features Attention-based DAG-Aware Variational Autoencoder (DAVA) for propagation graph generation. First, nearly 1 million pieces of user attributes data are collected. Then DAVA can integrate the analysis of propagation graph topology and corresponding user attributes as prior knowledge. By leveraging a lightweight attention-based framework and a sliding window mechanism based on BFS permutations weighted by user influence, DAVA significantly enhances the ability to generate realistic, large-scale propagation data, yielding graph scales ten times greater than those produced by existing SOTA methods. Every module of DAVA has flexibility and extension that allows for easy substitution to suit other generation tasks. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of DAVA, one focus is the effectiveness of generated data in improving the performance of downstream tasks. During the generation process, we discover the Credibility Erosion Effect by modifying the generation rules, revealing a social phenomenon in social network propagation.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Joint Source Localization in Different Platforms via Implicit Propagation Characteristics of Similar Topics

Zhen Wang
Dongpeng Hou
Shu Yin
Chao Gao
Xianghua Li

Different social media are widely used in our daily lives. Inspired by the fact that similar topics have similar propagation characteristics, we mine the implicit knowledge of cascades with similar topics from different platforms to enhance the localization performance for scenarios where limited propagation data leads to the weak learning ability of existing localization models. In this work, we first construct a multiple platform propagation cascade dataset, aligning similar topics from both Twitter and Weibo, and enriching it with user profiles. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a Dual-channel Source Localization Framework (DSLF) for the joint cascades with similar topics. Specifically, a self-loop attention based graph convolutional network is designed to adaptively adjust the neighborhood aggregation scheme of different users with heterogeneous features in the message-passing process. Additionally, a dual-structure based Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization module is proposed to constrain the latent distribution space of the source probabilities of similar characteristic-level users for a similar topic, enhancing the robustness of the model. Extensive experiments across Twitter and Weibo platforms demonstrate the superiority of the proposed DSLF over the SOTA methods. The code is available at https: //github. com/cgao-comp/DSLF.

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IJCAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Sequential Attention Source Identification Based on Feature Representation

Dongpeng Hou
Zhen Wang
Chao Gao
Xuelong Li

Snapshot observation based source localization has been widely studied due to its accessibility and low cost. However, the interaction of users in existing methods does not be addressed in time-varying infection scenarios. So these methods have a decreased accuracy in heterogeneous interaction scenarios. To solve this critical issue, this paper proposes a sequence-to-sequence based localization framework called Temporal-sequence based Graph Attention Source Identification (TGASI) based on an inductive learning idea. More specifically, the encoder focuses on generating multiple features by estimating the influence probability between two users, and the decoder distinguishes the importance of prediction sources in different timestamps by a designed temporal attention mechanism. It's worth mentioning that the inductive learning idea ensures that TGASI can detect the sources in new scenarios without knowing other prior knowledge, which proves the scalability of TGASI. Comprehensive experiments with the SOTA methods demonstrate the higher detection performance and scalability in different scenarios of TGASI.

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