arXiv:2512.00545cs.LGcs.SI2025-12被引 4

用强化学习让社交网络影响力扩散更公平,照顾弱势群体。

DQ4FairIM: Fairness-aware Influence Maximization using Deep Reinforcement Learning

  • 用深度Q学习与结构嵌入结合,构建公平的种子节点选择策略。
  • 在真实和合成数据上,公平性提升23%以上,性能损失更低。
  • 策略可跨网络规模和种子数泛化,无需重新训练。

影响最大化(IM)问题旨在给定预算下选择一组种子节点以最大化社交网络中的影响传播。然而,现实社交网络存在结构性不平等,如多数群体主导、少数群体边缘化。若忽略这些不平等,传统算法可能导致结果偏向多数群体,加剧歧视。本文提出一种基于深度强化学习的公平感知方法DQ4FairIM,通过最大最小公平目标优先提升最弱势群体的影响覆盖,实现各群体间均衡影响分布。该方法将IM建模为马尔可夫决策过程,结合深度Q学习与Structure2Vec网络嵌入,学习通用的种子选择策略。在合成基准与真实网络上的大量实验表明,本方法在公平性上优于基线(提升23%以上),且在公平性-性能权衡上表现更优;同时,所学策略能有效泛化至不同网络规模和种子数量,无需重新训练。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The Influence Maximization (IM) problem aims to select a set of seed nodes within a given budget to maximize the spread of influence in a social network. However, real-world social networks have several structural inequalities, such as dominant majority groups and underrepresented minority groups. If these inequalities are not considered while designing IM algorithms, the outcomes might be biased, disproportionately benefiting majority groups while marginalizing minorities. In this work, we address this gap by designing a fairness-aware IM method using Reinforcement Learning (RL) that ensures equitable influence outreach across all communities, regardless of protected attributes. Fairness is incorporated using a maximin fairness objective, which prioritizes improving the outreach of the least-influenced group, pushing the solution toward an equitable influence distribution. We propose a novel fairness-aware deep RL method, called DQ4FairIM, that maximizes the expected number of influenced nodes by learning an RL policy. The learnt policy ensures that minority groups formulate the IM problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and use deep Q-learning, combined with the Structure2Vec network embedding, earning together with Structure2Vec network embedding to solve the MDP. We perform extensive experiments on synthetic benchmarks and real-world networks to compare our method with fairness-agnostic and fairness-aware baselines. The results show that our method achieves a higher level of fairness while maintaining a better fairness-performance trade-off than baselines. Additionally, our approach learns effective seeding policies that generalize across problem instances without retraining, such as varying the network size or the number of seed nodes.

影响力最大化公平性强化学习社交网络

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