Influence Strength Estimation in Hyperbolic Space for Social Influence Maximization

The Influence Maximization (IM) problem aims to find a small set of influential users to maximize their influence spread in a social network. Traditional methods rely on fixed diffusion models with known parameters, limiting their generalization to real-world scenarios. In contrast, graph representation learning-based methods have gained wide attention for overcoming this limitation by learning user representations to capture influence characteristics. However, existing studies are built on Euclidean space, which fails to effectively capture the latent hierarchical features of social influence distribution. As a result, users' influence spread cannot be effectively measured through the learned representations. To alleviate these limitations, we propose HIM, a novel diffusion model agnostic method that leverages hyperbolic representation learning to estimate users' potential influence spread from social propagation data. HIM consists of two key components. First, a hyperbolic influence representation module encodes influence spread patterns from network structure and historical influence activations into expressive hyperbolic user representations. Hence, the influence magnitude of users can be reflected through the geometric properties of hyperbolic space, where highly influential users tend to cluster near the space origin. Second, a novel adaptive seed selection module is developed to flexibly and effectively select seed users using the positional information of learned user representations. Extensive experiments on five network datasets demonstrate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of our method for the IM problem with unknown diffusion model parameters, highlighting its potential for large-scale real-world social networks.