arXiv:2502.02943cs.SIcs.LG2025-02被引 14

用逆强化学习量化社交平台用户行为同质性,发现观点不同但互动模式相似的用户。

Behavioral Homophily in Social Media via Inverse Reinforcement Learning: A Reddit Case Study

  • 通过逆强化学习推断用户行为策略,作为同质性度量新方法
  • 在6年、590万次互动中发现行为同质性与话题差异可分离
  • 揭示专门挑刺的用户群体,适合研究社交媒体极化现象者

在线社区在塑造社会话语和影响现实世界集体行为方面起着关键作用。人们倾向于与具有相似特征和观点的人连接,这种现象称为同质性,是回音室形成的关键因素,进一步加剧了分化与极化。现有研究通常基于内容或邻接关系推断同质性,如构建显式互动网络或进行主题分析,但这些方法在难以构建交互网络的平台中效果不佳,且无法捕捉跨平台复杂互动的本质。本文提出一种新方法量化用户同质性:首先使用逆强化学习(IRL)框架推断用户策略,再以这些策略作为行为同质性的度量。我们在Reddit上开展案例研究,覆盖6年内590万次互动,揭示了不同社区中显著的行为模式与用户角色差异。我们还将该行为同质性度量与传统内容同质性对比验证,为分析社交媒体动态及其社会影响提供有力工具。结果表明,用户在讨论足球与电子竞技等完全不同话题时,仍可能表现出高度行为同质性;此外,存在一类用户其主要目的似乎是与他人争执。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Online communities play a critical role in shaping societal discourse and influencing collective behavior in the real world. The tendency for people to connect with others who share similar characteristics and views, known as homophily, plays a key role in the formation of echo chambers which further amplify polarization and division. Existing works examining homophily in online communities traditionally infer it using content- or adjacency-based approaches, such as constructing explicit interaction networks or performing topic analysis. These methods fall short for platforms where interaction networks cannot be easily constructed and fail to capture the complex nature of user interactions across the platform. This work introduces a novel approach for quantifying user homophily. We first use an Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) framework to infer users' policies, then use these policies as a measure of behavioral homophily. We apply our method to Reddit, conducting a case study across 5.9 million interactions over six years, demonstrating how this approach uncovers distinct behavioral patterns and user roles that vary across different communities. We further validate our behavioral homophily measure against traditional content-based homophily, offering a powerful method for analyzing social media dynamics and their broader societal implications. We find, among others, that users can behave very similarly (high behavioral homophily) when discussing entirely different topics like soccer vs e-sports (low topical homophily), and that there is an entire class of users on Reddit whose purpose seems to be to disagree with others.

社交网络同质性逆强化学习行为分析

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