Deep Graph Representation Learning and Optimization for Influence Maximization
Authors: Chen Ling, Junji Jiang, Junxiang Wang, My T. Thai, Renhao Xue, James Song, Meikang Qiu, Liang Zhao

Influence maximization (IM) is formulated as selecting a set of initial users from a social network to maximize the expected number of influenced users. Researchers have made great progresses to design various traditional methods, yet both theoretical design and performance gain are close to their limits. In the past few years, learning-based IM methods have emerged to achieve stronger generalization ability to unknown graphs than traditional ones. However, the development of learning-based IM methods is still limited by fundamental obstacles, including 1) the difficulty of effectively solving the objective function; 2) the difficulty of characterizing the diversified and underlying diffusion patterns; and 3) the difficulty of adapting the solution under various node-centrality-constrained IM variants. To cope with the above challenges, we design a novel framework DeepIM to generatively characterize the latent representation of seed sets, and we propose to learn the diversified information diffusion pattern in a data-driven and end-to-end manner. Finally, we design a novel objective function to infer optimal seed sets under flexible node-centrality-based budget constraints. Extensive analyses are conducted over both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the overall performance of DeepIM.