Adaptive Sampling-based Dynamic Graph Learning for Information Diffusion Prediction

Information diffusion prediction, aimed at estimating future interacting users for a given content, is crucial for various applications on online social platforms. Recently, methods based on dynamic graph learning have achieved superior performance. However, these methods often face scalability issues due to their full-neighbor aggregation, which requires loading the whole diffusion graph, making them impractical for large graphs. While improving model scalability through sampling is an immediate approach, it is challenging on the diffusion graph due to various user dependencies (i.e., the temporal and structural correlations of user–item interactions). To address this problem, we propose a new model named ASDIP, which performs adaptive sampling on the diffusion graph. Specifically, ASDIP employs multiple sampling strategies to extract walks from the diffusion graph, each identifying a representative user dependency by sampling walks that satisfy a specific temporal constraint. Next, the walks sampled by different strategies are first mapped into distinct strategy-specific user representations and then merged into a unified user representation, adaptively fusing the information obtained from different strategies. Finally, a cascade representation learning module is proposed to generate cascade representations based on user representations and interaction timestamps. Experimental results validate the effectiveness and scalability of ASDIP.