论文标题
意见动态具有不同的敏感性,可通过非凸面本地搜索说服力
Opinion Dynamics with Varying Susceptibility to Persuasion via Non-Convex Local Search
论文作者
论文摘要
社会心理学领域的一长串工作已经研究了人们对说服力的敏感性的差异 - 他们愿意修改对一个话题的看法的程度。这种文献的本体提出了一个有趣的观点,即通过与网络中的互动各方进行互动的理论模型:除了考虑直接修改人们的内在意见的干预措施外,也自然要考虑改变人们说服力的干预措施。在这项工作中,由于这一事实,我们为社会影响力提出了一个新的框架。具体来说,我们采用了一种流行的社会意见动态模型,每个代理都有一些固定的先天意见,以及一种衡量其天生意见的重要性的抵抗;代理人通过迭代过程影响彼此的意见。在非平凡的条件下,这种迭代过程会融合到一些平衡的意见向量。对于问题的提出变体,目标是选择每个代理(从给定范围)的电阻,以便将平衡意见的总和最小化。我们证明该目标函数在通常的非凸面中。因此,将问题提出为凸面程序,就像这项工作的早期版本中(Abebe等,KDD'18)可能存在潜在的正确性问题。我们取而代之的是分析目标函数的结构,并表明任何局部最优值也是一个全局最佳选择,这在某种程度上令人惊讶,因为目标函数可能不是凸。此外,我们将迭代过程和局部搜索范式结合在一起,以设计非常有效的算法,这些算法可以在包含数百万个节点的大规模图上最佳地求解问题的未算变体。最后,我们建议和评估一个启发式方法,以解决该问题的预算差异。
A long line of work in social psychology has studied variations in people's susceptibility to persuasion -- the extent to which they are willing to modify their opinions on a topic. This body of literature suggests an interesting perspective on theoretical models of opinion formation by interacting parties in a network: in addition to considering interventions that directly modify people's intrinsic opinions, it is also natural to consider interventions that modify people's susceptibility to persuasion. In this work, motivated by this fact we propose a new framework for social influence. Specifically, we adopt a popular model for social opinion dynamics, where each agent has some fixed innate opinion, and a resistance that measures the importance it places on its innate opinion; agents influence one another's opinions through an iterative process. Under non-trivial conditions, this iterative process converges to some equilibrium opinion vector. For the unbudgeted variant of the problem, the goal is to select the resistance of each agent (from some given range) such that the sum of the equilibrium opinions is minimized. We prove that the objective function is in general non-convex. Hence, formulating the problem as a convex program as in an early version of this work (Abebe et al., KDD'18) might have potential correctness issues. We instead analyze the structure of the objective function, and show that any local optimum is also a global optimum, which is somehow surprising as the objective function might not be convex. Furthermore, we combine the iterative process and the local search paradigm to design very efficient algorithms that can solve the unbudgeted variant of the problem optimally on large-scale graphs containing millions of nodes. Finally, we propose and evaluate experimentally a family of heuristics for the budgeted variation of the problem.