Disentangling Inter- and Intra-Cascades Dynamics for Information Diffusion Prediction

Information diffusion prediction is a vital component for a wide range of social applications, including viral marketing identification and precise recommendation. Prior methods focus on modeling contextual information from a single cascade, ignoring rich collaborative information behind historical interactions across various cascades and future data within the cascade. Leveraging such interactions can substantially enhance diffusion prediction performance but presents two major challenges: (1) user intents are usually entangled behind historical interactions; and (2) utilizing future data may introduce severe training-inference discrepancies. We present MIM, a novel information diffusion model merging multi-scale interactions for improving user intent learning and behavior retrieval. Specifically, we convert cascades and social relations into multi-channel hypergraphs, where each channel depicts a common fine-grained user intent behind historical interactions across cascades. By aggregating embeddings learned through multiple channels, we obtain comprehensive intent representations. Second, we decouple past- and future-level temporal influences within a cascade via a dual temporal network. Then we implement past-future knowledge transferring to enhance the knowledge learnt from the dual network via hierarchical knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments conducted on four datasets demonstrate that MIM significantly outperforms various benchmarks.