Urban Region Pre-training and Prompting: A Graph-based Approach

Urban region representation is crucial for various urban downstream tasks. However, despite the proliferation of methods and their success, acquiring general urban region knowledge and adapting to different tasks remains challenging. Previous work often neglects the spatial structures and functional layouts between entities, limiting their ability to capture transferable knowledge across regions. Further, these methods struggle to adapt effectively to specific downstream tasks, as they do not adequately address the unique features and relationships required for different downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a $\textbf{G}$raph-based $\textbf{U}$rban $\textbf{R}$egion $\textbf{P}$re-training and $\textbf{P}$rompting framework ($\textbf{GURPP}$) for region representation learning. Specifically, we first construct an urban region graph that integrates detailed spatial entity data for more effective urban region representation. Then, we develop a subgraph-centric urban region pre-training model to capture the heterogeneous and transferable patterns of interactions among entities. To further enhance the adaptability of these embeddings to different tasks, we design two graph-based prompting methods to incorporate explicit/hidden task knowledge. Extensive experiments on various urban region prediction tasks and different cities demonstrate the superior performance of our GURPP framework. The implementation is available at this repository: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GURPP.

Explicit Time Embedding Based Cascade Attention Network for Information Popularity Prediction

Predicting information cascade popularity is a fundamental problem in social networks. Capturing temporal attributes and cascade role information (e.g., cascade graphs and cascade sequences) is necessary for understanding the information cascade. Current methods rarely focus on unifying this information for popularity predictions, which prevents them from effectively modeling the full properties of cascades to achieve satisfactory prediction performances. In this paper, we propose an explicit Time embedding based Cascade Attention Network (TCAN) as a novel popularity prediction architecture for large-scale information networks. TCAN integrates temporal attributes (i.e., periodicity, linearity, and non-linear scaling) into node features via a general time embedding approach (TE), and then employs a cascade graph attention encoder (CGAT) and a cascade sequence attention encoder (CSAT) to fully learn the representation of cascade graphs and cascade sequences. We use two real-world datasets (i.e., Weibo and APS) with tens of thousands of cascade samples to validate our methods. Experimental results show that TCAN obtains mean logarithm squared errors of 2.007 and 1.201 and running times of 1.76 hours and 0.15 hours on both datasets, respectively. Furthermore, TCAN outperforms other representative baselines by 10.4%, 3.8%, and 10.4% in terms of MSLE, MAE, and R-squared on average while maintaining good interpretability.