Transfer Learning for Temporal Link Prediction

Link prediction on graphs has applications spanning from recommender systems to drug discovery. Temporal link prediction (TLP) refers to predicting future links in a temporally evolving graph and adds additional complexity related to the dynamic nature of graphs. State-of-the-art TLP models incorporate memory modules alongside graph neural networks to learn both the temporal mechanisms of incoming nodes and the evolving graph topology. However, memory modules only store information about nodes seen at train time, and hence such models cannot be directly transferred to entirely new graphs at test time and deployment. In this work, we study a new transfer learning task for temporal link prediction, and develop transfer-effective methods for memory-laden models. Specifically, motivated by work showing the informativeness of structural signals for the TLP task, we augment a structural mapping module to the existing TLP model architectures, which learns a mapping from graph structural (topological) features to memory embeddings. Our work paves the way for a memory-free foundation model for TLP.

Towards Realistic Synthetic User-Generated Content: A Scaffolding Approach to Generating Online Discussions

The emergence of synthetic data represents a pivotal shift in modern machine learning, offering a solution to satisfy the need for large volumes of data in domains where real data is scarce, highly private, or difficult to obtain. We investigate the feasibility of creating realistic, large-scale synthetic datasets of user-generated content, noting that such content is increasingly prevalent and a source of frequently sought information. Large language models (LLMs) offer a starting point for generating synthetic social media discussion threads, due to their ability to produce diverse responses that typify online interactions. However, as we demonstrate, straightforward application of LLMs yields limited success in capturing the complex structure of online discussions, and standard prompting mechanisms lack sufficient control. We therefore propose a multi-step generation process, predicated on the idea of creating compact representations of discussion threads, referred to as scaffolds. Our framework is generic yet adaptable to the unique characteristics of specific social media platforms. We demonstrate its feasibility using data from two distinct online discussion platforms. To address the fundamental challenge of ensuring the representativeness and realism of synthetic data, we propose a portfolio of evaluation measures to compare various instantiations of our framework.