Proceedings

Deep Identification of Propagation Trees in Graph Diffusion

Zeeshan Memon, Chen Ling, Ruochen Kong, Vishwanath Seshagiri, Andreas Züfle, Liang Zhao

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Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Main Track. Pages 4660-4668.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/519

Keywords

  • Machine Learning: Deep learning architectures

Abstract

Understanding how information or influence propagates through a network, such as during an epidemic outbreak or the spread of misinformation, is a fundamental yet challenging problem. While prior works have focused on cascade prediction (forecasting future infected nodes), network inference (recovering latent global diffusion graphs), or source localization (identifying diffusion's origin), these approaches do not recover the actual "who-infected-whom" propagation tree for a specific diffusion instance. We introduce DIPT (Deep Identification of Propagation Trees), a probabilistic framework that infers propagation trees from final observed node diffusion states, without knowledge of the underlying diffusion mechanism. DIPT models local influence strengths between nodes and uses a discrete-continuous alternating optimization strategy to jointly learn the diffusion mechanism and infer the propagation structure. Empirical results across eight real-world datasets demonstrate that DIPT consistently outperforms existing approaches in reconstructing propagation trees.

Zeeshan Memon, Chen Ling, Ruochen Kong, Vishwanath Seshagiri, Andreas Züfle, and Liang Zhao. 2026. Deep Identification of Propagation Trees in Graph Diffusion. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-26. IJCAI, 4660–4668. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/519
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