arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Jie Tang.
OpenAI Gym is a toolkit for reinforcement learning research. It includes a growing collection of benchmark problems that expose a common interface, and a website where people can share their results and compare the performance of algorithms. This whitepaper discusses the components of OpenAI Gym and the design decisions that went into the software.
We study the extent to which online social networks can be connected to open knowledge bases. The problem is referred to as learning social knowledge graphs. We propose a multi-modal Bayesian embedding model, GenVector, to learn latent topics that generate word and network embeddings. GenVector leverages large-scale unlabeled data with embeddings and represents data of two modalities---i.e., social network users and knowledge concepts---in a shared latent topic space. Experiments on three datasets show that the proposed method clearly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We then deploy the method on AMiner, a large-scale online academic search system with a network of 38,049,189 researchers with a knowledge base with 35,415,011 concepts. Our method significantly decreases the error rate in an online A/B test with live users.
Social instant messaging services are emerging as a transformative form with which people connect, communicate with friends in their daily life - they catalyze the formation of social groups, and they bring people stronger sense of community and connection. However, research community still knows little about the formation and evolution of groups in the context of social messaging - their lifecycles, the change in their underlying structures over time, and the diffusion processes by which they develop new members. In this paper, we analyze the daily usage logs from WeChat group messaging platform - the largest standalone messaging communication service in China - with the goal of understanding the processes by which social messaging groups come together, grow new members, and evolve over time. Specifically, we discover a strong dichotomy among groups in terms of their lifecycle, and develop a separability model by taking into account a broad range of group-level features, showing that long-term and short-term groups are inherently distinct. We also found that the lifecycle of messaging groups is largely dependent on their social roles and functions in users' daily social experiences and specific purposes. Given the strong separability between the long-term and short-term groups, we further address the problem concerning the early prediction of successful communities. In addition to modeling the growth and evolution from group-level perspective, we investigate the individual-level attributes of group members and study the diffusion process by which groups gain new members. By considering members' historical engagement behavior as well as the local social network structure that they embedded in, we develop a membership cascade model and demonstrate the effectiveness by achieving AUC of 95.31% in predicting inviter, and an AUC of 98.66% in predicting invitee.
The relationship between reading and writing (RRW) is one of the major themes in learning science. One of its obstacles is that it is difficult to define or measure the latent background knowledge of the individual. However, in an academic research setting, scholars are required to explicitly list their background knowledge in the citation sections of their manuscripts. This unique opportunity was taken advantage of to observe RRW, especially in the published academic commentary scenario. RRW was visualized under a proposed topic process model by using a state of the art version of latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). The empirical study showed that the academic commentary is modulated both by its target paper and the author's background knowledge. Although this conclusion was obtained in a unique environment, we suggest its implications can also shed light on other similar interesting areas, such as dialog and conversation, group discussion, and social media.
It is well-known that many networks follow a power-law degree distribution; however, the factors that influence the formation of their distributions are still unclear. How can one model the connection between individual actions and network distributions? How can one explain the formation of group phenomena and their evolutionary patterns? In this paper, we propose a unified framework, M3D, to model human dynamics in social networks from three perspectives: macro, meso, and micro. At the micro-level, we seek to capture the way in which an individual user decides whether to perform an action. At the meso-level, we study how group behavior develops and evolves over time, based on individual actions. At the macro-level, we try to understand how network distributions such as power-law (or heavy-tailed phenomena) can be explained by group behavior. We provide theoretical analysis for the proposed framework, and discuss the connection of our framework with existing work. The framework offers a new, flexible way to explain the interplay between individual user actions and network distributions, and can benefit many applications. To model heavy-tailed distributions from partially observed individual actions and to predict the formation of group behaviors, we apply M3D to three different genres of networks: Tencent Weibo, Citation, and Flickr. We also use information-burst prediction as a particular application to quantitatively evaluate the predictive power of the proposed framework. Our results on the Weibo indicate that M3D's prediction performance exceeds that of several alternative methods by up to 30\%.
Social status, defined as the relative rank or position that an individual holds in a social hierarchy, is known to be among the most important motivating forces in social behaviors. In this paper, we consider the notion of status from the perspective of a position or title held by a person in an enterprise. We study the intersection of social status and social networks in an enterprise. We study whether enterprise communication logs can help reveal how social interactions and individual status manifest themselves in social networks. To that end, we use two enterprise datasets with three communication channels --- voice call, short message, and email --- to demonstrate the social-behavioral differences among individuals with different status. We have several interesting findings and based on these findings we also develop a model to predict social status. On the individual level, high-status individuals are more likely to be spanned as structural holes by linking to people in parts of the enterprise networks that are otherwise not well connected to one another. On the community level, the principle of homophily, social balance and clique theory generally indicate a "rich club" maintained by high-status individuals, in the sense that this community is much more connected, balanced and dense. Our model can predict social status of individuals with 93% accuracy.
Estimating similarity between vertices is a fundamental issue in network analysis across various domains, such as social networks and biological networks. Methods based on common neighbors and structural contexts have received much attention. However, both categories of methods are difficult to scale up to handle large networks (with billions of nodes). In this paper, we propose a sampling method that provably and accurately estimates the similarity between vertices. The algorithm is based on a novel idea of random path, and an extended method is also presented, to enhance the structural similarity when two vertices are completely disconnected. We provide theoretical proofs for the error-bound and confidence of the proposed algorithm. We perform extensive empirical study and show that our algorithm can obtain top-k similar vertices for any vertex in a network approximately 300x faster than state-of-the-art methods. We also use identity resolution and structural hole spanner finding, two important applications in social networks, to evaluate the accuracy of the estimated similarities. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves clearly better performance than several alternative methods.
Visually mining a large influence graph is appealing yet challenging. People are amazed by pictures of newscasting graph on Twitter, engaged by hidden citation networks in academics, nevertheless often troubled by the unpleasant readability of the underlying visualization. Existing summarization methods enhance the graph visualization with blocked views, but have adverse effect on the latent influence structure. How can we visually summarize a large graph to maximize influence flows? In particular, how can we illustrate the impact of an individual node through the summarization? Can we maintain the appealing graph metaphor while preserving both the overall influence pattern and fine readability? To answer these questions, we first formally define the influence graph summarization problem. Second, we propose an end-to-end framework to solve the new problem. Our method can not only highlight the flow-based influence patterns in the visual summarization, but also inherently support rich graph attributes. Last, we present a theoretic analysis and report our experiment results. Both evidences demonstrate that our framework can effectively approximate the proposed influence graph summarization objective while outperforming previous methods in a typical scenario of visually mining academic citation networks.
Network alignment can be used to transfer functional knowledge between conserved regions of different networks. Typically, existing methods use a node cost function (NCF) to compute similarity between nodes in different networks and an alignment strategy (AS) to find high-scoring alignments with respect to the total NCF over all aligned nodes (or node conservation). But, they then evaluate quality of their alignments via some other measure that is different than the node conservation measure used to guide the alignment construction process. Typically, one measures the amount of conserved edges, but only after alignments are produced. Hence, a recent attempt aimed to directly maximize the amount of conserved edges while constructing alignments, which improved alignment accuracy. Here, we aim to directly maximize both node and edge conservation during alignment construction to further improve alignment accuracy. For this, we design a novel measure of edge conservation that (unlike existing measures that treat each conserved edge the same) weighs each conserved edge so that edges with highly NCF-similar end nodes are favored. As a result, we introduce a novel AS, Weighted Alignment VotEr (WAVE), which can optimize any measures of node and edge conservation, and which can be used with any NCF or combination of multiple NCFs. Using WAVE on top of established state-of-the-art NCFs leads to superior alignments compared to the existing methods that optimize only node conservation or only edge conservation or that treat each conserved edge the same. And while we evaluate WAVE in the computational biology domain, it is easily applicable in any domain.
In this work, we formulate the problem of social network integration. It takes multiple observed social networks as input and returns an integrated global social graph where each node corresponds to a real person. The key challenge for social network integration is to discover the correspondences or interlinks across different social networks. We engaged an in-depth analysis across three online social networks, AMiner, Linkedin, and Videolectures in order to address what reveals users' social identity, whether the social factors consistent across different social networks and how we can leverage these information to perform integration. We proposed a unified framework for the social network integration task. It crawls data from multiple social networks and further discovers accounts correspond to the same real person from the obtained networks. We use a probabilistic model to determine such correspondence, it incorporates features like the consistency of social status and social ties across different, as well as one-to-one mapping constraint and logical transitivity to jointly make the prediction. Empirical experiments verify the effectiveness of our method.
Images become an important and prevalent way to express users' activities, opinions and emotions. In a social network, individual emotions may be influenced by others, in particular by close friends. We focus on understanding how users embed emotions into the images they uploaded to the social websites and how social influence plays a role in changing users' emotions. We first verify the existence of emotion influence in the image networks, and then propose a probabilistic factor graph based emotion influence model to answer the questions of "who influences whom". Employing a real network from Flickr as experimental data, we study the effectiveness of factors in the proposed model with in-depth data analysis. Our experiments also show that our model, by incorporating the emotion influence, can significantly improve the accuracy (+5%) for predicting emotions from images. Finally, a case study is used as the anecdotal evidence to further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.
China has the largest number of online users in the world and about 20% internet users are from China. This is a huge, as well as a mysterious, market for IT industry due to various reasons such as culture difference. Twitter is the largest microblogging service in the world and Tencent Weibo is one of the largest microblogging services in China. Employ the two data sets as a source in our study, we try to unveil the unique behaviors of Chinese users. We have collected the entire Tencent Weibo from 10th, Oct, 2011 to 5th, Jan, 2012 and obtained 320 million user profiles, 5.15 billion user actions. We study Tencent Weibo from both macro and micro levels. From the macro level, Tencent users are more active on forwarding messages, but with less reciprocal relationships than Twitter users, their topic preferences are very different from Twitter users from both content and time consuming; besides, information can be diffused more efficient in Tencent Weibo. From the micro level, we mainly evaluate users' social influence from two indexes: "Forward" and \Follower", we study how users' actions will contribute to their social influences, and further identify unique features of Tencent users. According to our studies, Tencent users' actions are more personalized and diversity, and the influential users play a more important part in the whole networks. Based on the above analysis, we design a graphical model for predicting users' forwarding behaviors. Our experimental results on the large Tencent Weibo data validate the correctness of the discoveries and the effectiveness of the proposed model. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first quantitative study on the entire Tencentsphere and information diffusion on it.
Tencent Weibo, as one of the most popular micro-blogging services in China, has attracted millions of users, producing 30-60 millions of weibo (similar as tweet in Twitter) daily. With the overload problem of user generate content, Tencent users find it is more and more hard to browse and find valuable information at the first time. In this paper, we propose a Factor Graph based weibo recommendation algorithm TSI-WR (Topic-Level Social Influence based Weibo Recommendation), which could help Tencent users to find most suitable information. The main innovation is that we consider both direct and indirect social influence from topic level based on social balance theory. The main advantages of adopting this strategy are that it could first build a more accurate description of latent relationship between two users with weak connections, which could help to solve the data sparsity problem; second provide a more accurate recommendation for a certain user from a wider range. Other meaningful contextual information is also combined into our model, which include: Users profile, Users influence, Content of weibos, Topic information of weibos and etc. We also design a semi-supervised algorithm to further reduce the influence of data sparisty. The experiments show that all the selected variables are important and the proposed model outperforms several baseline methods.
Mining user opinion from Micro-Blogging has been extensively studied on the most popular social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook in the U.S., but few studies have been done on Micro-Blogging websites in other countries (e.g. China). In this paper, we analyze the social opinion influence on Tencent, one of the largest Micro-Blogging websites in China, endeavoring to unveil the behavior patterns of Chinese Micro-Blogging users. This paper proposes a Topic-Level Opinion Influence Model (TOIM) that simultaneously incorporates topic factor and social direct influence in a unified probabilistic framework. Based on TOIM, two topic level opinion influence propagation and aggregation algorithms are developed to consider the indirect influence: CP (Conservative Propagation) and NCP (None Conservative Propagation). Users' historical social interaction records are leveraged by TOIM to construct their progressive opinions and neighbors' opinion influence through a statistical learning process, which can be further utilized to predict users' future opinions on some specific topics. To evaluate and test this proposed model, an experiment was designed and a sub-dataset from Tencent Micro-Blogging was used. The experimental results show that TOIM outperforms baseline methods on predicting users' opinion. The applications of CP and NCP have no significant differences and could significantly improve recall and F1-measure of TOIM.
We show that information about social relationships can be used to improve user-level sentiment analysis. The main motivation behind our approach is that users that are somehow "connected" may be more likely to hold similar opinions; therefore, relationship information can complement what we can extract about a user's viewpoints from their utterances. Employing Twitter as a source for our experimental data, and working within a semi-supervised framework, we propose models that are induced either from the Twitter follower/followee network or from the network in Twitter formed by users referring to each other using "@" mentions. Our transductive learning results reveal that incorporating social-network information can indeed lead to statistically significant sentiment-classification improvements over the performance of an approach based on Support Vector Machines having access only to textual features.
It becomes more difficult to explain the social information transfer phenomena using the classic models based merely on Shannon Information Theory (SIT) and Classic Probability Theory (CPT), because the transfer process in the social world is rich of semantic and highly contextualized. This paper aims to use twitter data to explore whether the traditional models can interpret information transfer in social networks, and whether quantum-like phenomena can be spotted in social networks. Our main contributions are: (1) SIT and CPT fail to interpret the information transfer occurring in Twitter; and (2) Quantum interference exists in Twitter, and (3) a mathematical model is proposed to elucidate the spotted quantum phenomena.
The overwhelming amount of available scholarly literature in the life sciences poses significant challenges to scientists wishing to keep up with important developments related to their research, but also provides a useful resource for the discovery of recent information concerning genes, diseases, compounds and the interactions between them. In this paper, we describe an algorithm called Bio-LDA that uses extracted biological terminology to automatically identify latent topics, and provides a variety of measures to uncover putative relations among topics and bio-terms. Relationships identified using those approaches are combined with existing data in life science datasets to provide additional insight. Three case studies demonstrate the utility of the Bio-LDA model, including association predication, association search and connectivity map generation. This combined approach offers new opportunities for knowledge discovery in many areas of biology including target identification, lead hopping and drug repurposing.