activity
20172026
most citedFake news and rumors: a trigger for proliferation or fading away

20 citations · 58 across the 42 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

49 papers

cs.CC2026

Alex Meiburg

The existential theory of the reals asks whether polynomial constraints with integer coefficients have a real solution. We give a proof placing this problem in the counting hierarc…

cs.LG2026

Not Just Oversmoothing: Detecting the Echo Chamber Effect in Graph Neural Networks

Asela Hevapathige, Ahad N. Zehmakan, Asiri Wijesinghe +1

Oversmoothing is a well-known failure mode of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, most existing diagnostics rely on global aggregation measures that fail to capture the heteroge…

cs.SI2026

JECHO: Scalable Echo Chamber Detection via Jaccard-based Homophily and Seed Expansion

Ali Safarpoor Dehkordi, Atsushi Miyauchi, Francesco Bonchi +1

Detecting echo chambers is critical for understanding and limiting negative social phenomena, such as online polarization, misinformation, and conspiracy theory diffusion. However,…

cs.SI2026

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…

cs.LG2026

Invariant-Stratified Propagation for Expressive Graph Neural Networks

Asela Hevapathige, Ahad N. Zehmakan, Asiri Wijesinghe +1

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) face fundamental limitations in expressivity and capturing structural heterogeneity. Standard message-passing architectures are constrained by the 1-di…

cs.SI2026

Efficient Edge Rewiring Strategies for Enhancing PageRank Fairness

Changan Liu, Haoxin Sun, Ahad N. Zehmakan +1

We study the notion of unfairness in social networks, where a group such as females in a male-dominated industry are disadvantaged in access to important information, e.g. job post…

cs.SI2025

Promoting Fairness in Information Access within Social Networks

Changan Liu, Xiaotian Zhou, Ahad N. Zehmakan +1

The advent of online social networks has facilitated fast and wide spread of information. However, some users, especially members of minority groups, may be less likely to receive…

cs.SI2025

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…

cs.LG2025

Beyond Fixed Depth: Adaptive Graph Neural Networks for Node Classification Under Varying Homophily

Asela Hevapathige, Asiri Wijesinghe, Ahad N. Zehmakan

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved significant success in addressing node classification tasks. However, the effectiveness of traditional GNNs degrades on heterophilic grap…

cs.LG2025

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…

cs.SI2025

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…

cs.AI2025★ 1 cited

Efficient Algorithms for Computing Random Walk Centrality

Changan Liu, Zixuan Xie, Ahad N. Zehmakan +1

Random walk centrality is a fundamental metric in graph mining for quantifying node importance and influence, defined as the weighted average of hitting times to a node from all ot…

cs.LG2025

Graph Neural Diffusion via Generalized Opinion Dynamics

Asela Hevapathige, Asiri Wijesinghe, Ahad N. Zehmakan

There has been a growing interest in developing diffusion-based Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), building on the connections between message passing mechanisms in GNNs and physical di…

cs.SI2025

Graph-based Fake Account Detection: A Survey

Ali Safarpoor Dehkordi, Ahad N. Zehmakan

In recent years, there has been a growing effort to develop effective and efficient algorithms for fake account detection in online social networks. This survey comprehensively rev…

cs.SI2025

The Impact of External Sources on the Friedkin-Johnsen Model

Charlotte Out, Sijing Tu, Stefan Neumann +1

To obtain a foundational understanding of timeline algorithms and viral content in shaping public opinions, computer scientists started to study augmented versions of opinion forma…

cs.DM2025★ 7 cited

Efficient Algorithms for Minimizing the Kirchhoff Index via Adding Edges

Xiaotian Zhou, Ahad N. Zehmakan, Zhongzhi Zhang

The Kirchhoff index, which is the sum of the resistance distance between every pair of nodes in a network, is a key metric for gauging network performance, where lower values signi…

cs.LG2025

Depth-Adaptive Graph Neural Networks via Learnable Bakry-'Emery Curvature

Asela Hevapathige, Ahad N. Zehmakan, Qing Wang

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated strong representation learning capabilities for graph-based tasks. Recent advances on GNNs leverage geometric properties, such as cur…

cs.SI2025

More Efficient Sybil Detection Mechanisms Leveraging Resistance of Users to Attack Requests

Ali Safarpoor Dehkordi, Ahad N. Zehmakan

We investigate the problem of sybil (fake account) detection in social networks from a graph algorithms perspective, where graph structural information is used to classify users as…

cs.LG2024

DeepSN: A Sheaf Neural Framework for Influence Maximization

Asela Hevapathige, Qing Wang, Ahad N. Zehmakan

Influence maximization is key topic in data mining, with broad applications in social network analysis and viral marketing. In recent years, researchers have increasingly turned to…

cs.SI2024

A Generalisation of Voter Model: Influential Nodes and Convergence Properties

Abhiram Manohara, Ahad N. Zehmakan

Consider an undirected graph G, representing a social network, where each node is blue or red, corresponding to positive or negative opinion on a topic. In the voter model, in disc…

cs.SI2024

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…

cs.SI2024

Fast Query of Biharmonic Distance in Networks

Changan Liu, Ahad N. Zehmakan, Zhongzhi Zhang

The \textit{biharmonic distance} (BD) is a fundamental metric that measures the distance of two nodes in a graph. It has found applications in network coherence, machine learning,…

cs.IR2024

A First Principles Approach to Trust-Based Recommendation Systems in Social Networks

Paras Stefanopoulos, Sourin Chatterjee, Ahad N. Zehmakan

This paper explores recommender systems in social networks which leverage information such as item rating, intra-item similarities, and trust graph. We demonstrate that item-rating…

cs.SI2023★ 1 cited

Viral Marketing in Social Networks with Competing Products

Ahad N. Zehmakan, Xiaotian Zhou, Zhongzhi Zhang

Consider a directed network where each node is either red (using the red product), blue (using the blue product), or uncolored (undecided). Then in each round, an uncolored node ch…