Tabular Foundation Models for Multi-View Information Cascade Popularity Prediction

2026-08-25

AI Summary

为解决信息级联预测中忽略多视角信息及跨视角交互问题，提出TFM4POP框架，利用表格基础模型统一建模多种异构信息，并通过双分支设计和高效微调方法提升预测性能。

Abstract

Predicting the future popularity of information cascades is essential for understanding information diffusion on social media. Despite recent advances, existing methods face two key limitations: they focus primarily on the cascade view while overlooking other information views that drive user engagement, such as textual semantics, visual content, and tabular attributes; and they fail to capture high-order cross-view interactions. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{TFM4POP}, the first framework to introduce tabular foundation models (TFMs) into popularity prediction, leveraging their pre-trained tabular priors to unify the modeling of multiple heterogeneous information views. Specifically, TFM4POP adopts a dual-branch design: the static branch employs a TFM as the feature-encoding backbone that jointly reasons over all static views through in-context learning to produce the static cascade representation, while the dynamic branch captures the continuous-time cascade dynamics with a dedicated Neural-ODE-based encoder. The two representations are then fused via cross-attention for the final prediction. Furthermore, to adapt the TFM to real cascade distributions, we apply parameter-efficient IA3 fine-tuning, achieving performance competitive with or better than full fine-tuning while updating substantially fewer parameters. In addition, we construct a comprehensive multi-view cascade benchmark that covers all four information views. Extensive experiments show that TFM4POP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple datasets and observation settings.

Problem

• information cascade
• popularity prediction
• multi-view information
• cross-view interactions

Innovation

• Tabular Foundation Models
• Multi-View Information
• Cross-View Interactions
• Dual-Branch Design
• Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning