5 papers
Opinion Polarization in LLM-Based Social Networks: Manipulation and Mitigation
Ali Safarpoor Dehkordi, Mohammad Shirzadi, Ahad N. Zehmakan
How vulnerable are online social networks to adversaries who seek to amplify opinion polarization by manipulating opinions, and how difficult is it to mitigate such manipulation? E…
Quantifying and Minimizing Perception Gap in Social Networks
Hemant Kumar Gehlot, Mohammad Shirzadi, Junhao Gan +1
Social media has transformed global communication, yet its network structure can systematically distort perceptions through effects like the majority illusion and echo chambers. We…
Adaptive Initial Residual Connections for GNNs with Theoretical Guarantees
Mohammad Shirzadi, Ali Safarpoor Dehkordi, Ahad N. Zehmakan
Message passing is the core operation in graph neural networks, where each node updates its embeddings by aggregating information from its neighbors. However, in deep architectures…
Opinion Dynamics: A Comprehensive Overview
Mohammad Shirzadi, Emilio Cruciani, Ahad N. Zehmakan
Opinion dynamics, the evolution of individuals through social interactions, is an important area of research with applications ranging from politics to marketing. Due to its interd…
Do Stubborn Users Always Cause More Polarization and Disagreement? A Mathematical Study
Mohammad Shirzadi, Ahad N. Zehmakan
We study how the stubbornness of social network users influences opinion polarization and disagreement. Our work is in the context of the popular Friedkin-Johnson opinion formation…