Discovering the antecedents of individuals' influence in collaborative environments is an important, practical, and challenging problem. In this paper, we study interpersonal influence in small groups of individuals who collectively execute a sequence of intellective tasks. We observe that along an issue sequence with feedback, individuals with higher expertise and social confidence are accorded higher interpersonal influence. We also observe that low-performing individuals tend to underestimate their high-performing teammate's expertise. Based on these observations, we introduce three hypotheses and present empirical and theoretical support for their validity. We report empirical evidence on longstanding theories of transactive memory systems, social comparison, and confidence heuristics on the origins of social influence. We propose a cognitive dynamical model inspired by these theories to describe the process by which individuals adjust interpersonal influences over time. We demonstrate the model's accuracy in predicting individuals' influence and provide analytical results on its asymptotic behavior for the case with identically performing individuals. Lastly, we propose a novel approach using deep neural networks on a pre-trained text embedding model for predicting the influence of individuals. Using message contents, message times, and individual correctness collected during tasks, we are able to accurately predict individuals' self-reported influence over time. Extensive experiments verify the accuracy of the proposed models compared to baselines such as structural balance and reflected appraisal model. While the neural networks model is the most accurate, the dynamical model is the most interpretable for influence prediction.

Today, OpenAI released its first threat report, detailing how actors from Russia, Iran, China, and Israel have attempted to use its technology for foreign influence operations across the globe. The report named five different networks that OpenAI identified and shut down between 2023 and 2024. In the report, OpenAI reveals that established networks like Russia's Doppleganger and China's Spamoflauge are experimenting with how to use generative AI to automate their operations. And while it's a modest relief that these actors haven't mastered generative AI to become unstoppable forces for disinformation, it's clear that they're experimenting, and that alone should be worrying. The OpenAI report reveals that influence campaigns are running up against the limits of generative AI, which doesn't reliably produce good copy or code.

A long-standing debate is whether social influence improves the collective wisdom of a crowd or undermines it. This paper addresses this question based on a naive learning setting in influence systems theory: in our models individuals evolve their estimates of an unknown truth according to the weighted-average opinion dynamics. A formal mathematization is provided with rigorous theoretical analysis. We obtain various conditions for improving, optimizing and undermining the crowd accuracy, respectively. We prove that if the wisdom of finite-size group is improved, then the collective estimate converges to the truth as group size increases, provided individuals' variances are finite. We show that whether social influence improves or undermines the wisdom is determined by the social power allocation of the influence system: if the influence system allocates relatively larger social power to relatively more accurate individuals, it improves the wisdom; on the contrary, if the influence system assigns less social power to more accurate individuals, it undermines the wisdom. At a population level, individuals' susceptibilities to interpersonal influence and network centralities are both crucial. To improve the wisdom, more accurate individuals should be less susceptible and have larger network centralities. Particularly, in democratic influence networks, if relatively more accurate individuals are relatively less susceptible, the wisdom is improved; if more accurate individuals are more susceptible, the wisdom is undermined, which is consistent with the reported empirical evidence. Our investigation provides a theoretical framework for understanding the role social influence plays in the emergence of collective wisdom.

The importance of considering related stocks data for the prediction of stock price movement has been shown in many studies, however, advanced graphical techniques for modeling, embedding and analyzing the behavior of interrelated stocks have not been widely exploited for the prediction of stocks price movements yet. The main challenges in this domain are to find a way for modeling the existing relations among an arbitrary set of stocks and to exploit such a model for improving the prediction performance for those stocks. The most of existing methods in this domain rely on basic graph-analysis techniques, with limited prediction power, and suffer from a lack of generality and flexibility. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, called GCNET that models the relations among an arbitrary set of stocks as a graph structure called influence network and uses a set of history-based prediction models to infer plausible initial labels for a subset of the stock nodes in the graph. Finally, GCNET uses the Graph Convolutional Network algorithm to analyze this partially labeled graph and predicts the next price direction of movement for each stock in the graph. GCNET is a general prediction framework that can be applied for the prediction of the price fluctuations of interacting stocks based on their historical data. Our experiments and evaluations on a set of stocks from the NASDAQ index demonstrate that GCNET significantly improves the performance of SOTA in terms of accuracy and MCC measures.

Network estimation from multi-variate point process or time series data is a problem of fundamental importance. Prior work has focused on parametric approaches that require a known parametric model, which makes estimation procedures less robust to model mis-specification, non-linearities and heterogeneities. In this paper, we develop a semi-parametric approach based on the monotone single-index multi-variate autoregressive model (SIMAM) which addresses these challenges. We provide theoretical guarantees for dependent data and an alternating projected gradient descent algorithm. Significantly we do not explicitly assume mixing conditions on the process (although we do require conditions analogous to restricted strong convexity) and we achieve rates of the form $O(T^{-\frac{1}{3}} \sqrt{s\log(TM)})$ (optimal in the independent design case) where $s$ is the threshold for the maximum in-degree of the network that indicates the sparsity level, $M$ is the number of actors and $T$ is the number of time points. In addition, we demonstrate the superior performance both on simulated data and two real data examples where our SIMAM approach out-performs state-of-the-art parametric methods both in terms of prediction and network estimation.

Policy gradient methods can solve complex tasks but often fail when the dimensionality of the action-space or objective multiplicity grow very large. This occurs, in part, because the variance on score-based gradient estimators scales quadratically with the number of targets. In this paper, we propose a causal baseline which exploits independence structure encoded in a novel action-target influence network. Causal policy gradients (CPGs), which follow, provide a common framework for analysing key state-of-the-art algorithms, are shown to generalise traditional policy gradients, and yield a principled way of incorporating prior knowledge of a problem domain's generative processes. We provide an analysis of the proposed estimator and identify the conditions under which variance is guaranteed to improve. The algorithmic aspects of CPGs are also discussed, including optimal policy factorisations, their complexity, and the use of conditioning to efficiently scale to extremely large, concurrent tasks. The performance advantages for two variants of the algorithm are demonstrated on large-scale bandit and concurrent inventory management problems.

The weaponization of digital communications and social media to conduct disinformation campaigns at immense scale, speed, and reach presents new challenges to identify and counter hostile influence operations (IO). This paper presents an end-to-end framework to automate detection of disinformation narratives, networks, and influential actors. The framework integrates natural language processing, machine learning, graph analytics, and a novel network causal inference approach to quantify the impact of individual actors in spreading IO narratives. We demonstrate its capability on real-world hostile IO campaigns with Twitter datasets collected during the 2017 French presidential elections, and known IO accounts disclosed by Twitter over a broad range of IO campaigns (May 2007-February 2020), over 50 thousand accounts, 17 countries, and different account types including both trolls and bots. Our system detects IO accounts with 96% precision, 79% recall, and 96% area-under-the-PR-curve, maps out salient network communities, and discovers high-impact accounts that escape the lens of traditional impact statistics based on activity counts and network centrality. Results are corroborated with independent sources of known IO accounts from U.S. Congressional reports, investigative journalism, and IO datasets provided by Twitter.