skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Inductive detection of influence operations via graph learning
Influence operations are large-scale efforts to manipulate public opinion. The rapid detection and disruption of these operations is critical for healthy public discourse. Emergent AI technologies may enable novel operations that evade detection and influence public discourse on social media with greater scale, reach, and specificity. New methods of detection with inductive learning capacity will be needed to identify novel operations before they indelibly alter public opinion and events. To this end, we develop an inductive learning framework that: (1) determines content- and graph-based indicators that are not specific to any operation; (2) uses graph learning to encode abstract signatures of coordinated manipulation; and (3) evaluates generalization capacity by training and testing models across operations originating from Russia, China, and Iran. We find that this framework enables strong cross-operation generalization while also revealing salient indicators-illustrating a generic approach which directly complements transductive methodologies, thereby enhancing detection coverage.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2125677
PAR ID:
10521622
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Nature Portfolio
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Scientific Reports
Volume:
13
Issue:
1
ISSN:
2045-2322
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. 2.5D chiplet-based technology promises an efficient integration technique for advanced designs with more functionality and higher performance. Temperature and related thermal optimization, heat removal are of critical importance for temperature-aware physical synthesis for chiplets. This paper presents a novel graph convolutional networks (GCN) architecture to estimate the thermal map of the 2.5D chiplet-based systems with the thermal resistance networks built by the compact thermal model (CTM). First, we take the total power of all chiplets as an input feature, which is a global feature. This additional global information can overcome the limitation that the GCN can only extract local information via neighborhood aggregation. Second, inspired by convolutional neural networks (CNN), we add skip connection into the GCN to pass the global feature directly across the hidden layers with the concatenation operation. Third, to consider the edge embedding feature, we propose an edge-based attention mechanism based on the graph attention networks (GAT). Last, with the multiple aggregators and scalers of principle neighborhood aggregation (PNA) networks, we can further improve the modeling capacity of the novel GCN. The experimental results show that the proposed GCN model can achieve an average RMSE of 0.31 K and deliver a 2.6$$\times$$ speedup over the fast steady-state solver of open-source {\it HotSpot} based on SuperLU. More importantly, the GCN model demonstrates more useful generalization or transferable capability. Our results show that the trained GCN can be directly applied to predict thermal maps of six unseen datasets with acceptable mean RMSEs of less than 0.67 K without retraining via inductive learning. 
    more » « less
  2. Consider public health officials aiming to spread awareness about a new vaccine in a community interconnected by a social network. How can they distribute information with minimal resources, so as to avoid polarization and ensure community-wide convergence of opinion? To tackle such challenges, we initiate the study of sample complexity of opinion formation in networks. Our framework is built on the recognized opinion formation game, where we regard each agent’s opinion as a data-derived model, unlike previous works that treat opinions as data-independent scalars. The opinion model for every agent is initially learned from its local samples and evolves game-theoretically as all agents communicate with neighbors and revise their models towards an equilibrium. Our focus is on the sample complexity needed to ensure that the opinions converge to an equilibrium such that every agent’s final model has low generalization error. Our paper has two main technical results. First, we present a novel polynomial time optimization framework to quantify the total sample complexity for arbitrary networks, when the underlying learning problem is (generalized) linear regression. Second, we leverage this optimization to study the network gain which measures the improvement of sample complexity when learning over a network compared to that in isolation. Towards this end, we derive network gain bounds for various network classes including cliques, star graphs, and random regular graphs. Additionally, our framework provides a method to study sample distribution within the network, suggesting that it is sufficient to allocate samples inversely to the degree. Empirical results on both synthetic and real-world networks strongly support our theoretical findings. 
    more » « less
  3. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various graph-based machine learning tasks, yet evaluating the importance of neighbors of testing nodes remains largely unexplored due to the challenge of assessing data importance without test labels. To address this gap, we propose Shapley-Guided Utility Learning (SGUL), a novel framework for graph inference data valuation. SGUL innovatively combines transferable data-specific and model-specific features to approximate test accuracy without relying on ground truth labels. By incorporating Shapley values as a preprocessing step and using feature Shapley values as input, our method enables direct optimization of Shapley value prediction while reducing computational demands. SGUL overcomes key limitations of existing methods, including poor generalization to unseen test-time structures and indirect optimization. Experiments on diverse graph datasets demonstrate that SGUL consistently outperforms existing baselines in both inductive and transductive settings. SGUL offers an effective, efficient, and interpretable approach for quantifying the value of test-time neighbors. 
    more » « less
  4. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated a significant success in various graph learning tasks, from graph classification to anomaly detection. There recently has emerged a number of approaches adopting a graph pooling operation within GNNs, with a goal to preserve graph attributive and structural features during the graph representation learning. However, most existing graph pooling operations suffer from the limitations of relying on node-wise neighbor weighting and embedding, which leads to insufficient encoding of rich topological structures and node attributes exhibited by real-world networks. By invoking the machinery of persistent homology and the concept of landmarks, we propose a novel topological pooling layer and witness complex-based topological embedding mechanism that allow us to systematically integrate hidden topological information at both local and global levels. Specifically, we design new learnable local and global topological representations Wit-TopoPool which allow us to simultaneously extract rich discriminative topological information from graphs. Experiments on 11 diverse benchmark datasets against 18 baseline models in conjunction with graph classification tasks indicate that Wit-TopoPool significantly outperforms all competitors across all datasets. 
    more » « less
  5. Machine learning frameworks such as graph neural networks typically rely on a given, fixed graph to exploit relational inductive biases and thus effectively learn from network data. However, when said graphs are (partially) unobserved, noisy, or dynamic, the problem of inferring graph structure from data becomes relevant. In this paper, we postulate a graph convolutional relationship between the observed and latent graphs, and formulate the graph structure learning task as a network inverse (deconvolution) problem. In lieu of eigendecomposition-based spectral methods or iterative optimization solutions, we unroll and truncate proximal gradient iterations to arrive at a parameterized neural network architecture that we call a Graph Deconvolution Network (GDN). GDNs can learn a distribution of graphs in a supervised fashion, perform link prediction or edge-weight regression tasks by adapting the loss function, and they are inherently inductive as well as node permutation equivariant. We corroborate GDN’s superior graph learning performance and its generalization to larger graphs using synthetic data in supervised settings. Moreover, we demonstrate the robustness and representation power of GDNs on real world neuroimaging and social network datasets. 
    more » « less