Reverse Prevention Sampling for Misinformation Mitigation in Social Networks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this work, we consider misinformation propagating through a social network and study the problem of its prevention. In this problem, a "bad" campaign starts propagating from a set of seed nodes in the network and we use the notion of a limiting (or "good") campaign to counteract the effect of misinformation. The goal is to identify a set of k users that need to be convinced to adopt the limiting campaign so as to minimize the number of people that adopt the "bad" campaign at the end of both propagation processes. \nThis work presents RPS (Reverse Prevention Sampling), an algorithm that provides a scalable solution to the misinformation prevention problem. Our theoretical analysis shows that RPS runs in O((k + l)(n + m)(1/(1 - γ)) log n / ε²) expected time and returns a (1 - 1/e - ε)-approximate solution with at least 1 - n^{-l} probability (where γ is a typically small network parameter and l is a confidence parameter). The time complexity of RPS substantially improves upon the previously best-known algorithms that run in time Ω(m n k ⋅ POLY(ε^{-1})). We experimentally evaluate RPS on large datasets and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art solution by several orders of magnitude in terms of running time. This demonstrates that misinformation prevention can be made practical while still offering strong theoretical guarantees.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".