Enhancing Relation Modeling with Social Attributes for Social Media Popularity Prediction

Abstract

Recent studies highlight the critical role of retrieval-augmented mechanisms in social media popularity prediction (SMPP). Although such frameworks have improved SMPP performance by leveraging historical posts, existing methods still suffer from the low retrieval accuracy due to the oversight of relative relationships among UGC instances. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Relation-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented framework (RE-Rag) that models UGC similarity as a continuous relation jointly driven by semantic content and social attributes. Specifically, RE-Rag employs a Semantic-Attribute Retriever (SAR) to obtain instances aligned in both semantic and social-attribute distributions. Subsequently, we design a Relation-Guided Predictor (RGP): first, cross-attention encodes multimodal features of retrieved instances; then, a relative relation graph is introduced to guide attention weight allocation, forming a Relation-Guided Transformer (RGTs) that dynamically modulate attention weights based on relative attribute relations to capture the interplay between semantics and various social attributes. The refined features are fused with the target instance for popularity prediction. Experiments on three public benchmarks show that RE-Rag consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both prediction accuracy and retrieval efficiency.