Good Advisor for Source Localization: Using Large Language Model to Guide the Source Inference Process

With the rapid development of AI large model technology, large language models (LLMs) provide a new solution for source localization tasks due to the deep linguistic understanding and generation capabilities. However, it is difficult to understand complex propagation patterns and network structures when LLMs are directly applied to source localization, resulting in limited accuracy of source localization. Meanwhile, the high-dimensional embedding of the textual representation introduces significant amounts of redundant features, which also reduces its efficiency in source localization task to some extent. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a multi-modal fusion framework for rumor source localization, namely Contrastive Rumor Source Localization via LLM (CRSLL), based on the idea of contrastive learning. Specifically, the framework constructs propagation embeddings by comprehensively capturing both propagation dynamics and user profile features, adopts a contrastive learning approach to enhance the representation ability of comment embeddings of rumor cascades by differentiating them from non-rumor cascade comments, filters out invalid features through a differentiable masking strategy, and fuses comment modality embeddings with propagation embeddings through an attention mechanism, so as to better capture the multi-modal data interactions. It is worth mentioning that the framework uses LLM as a good “advisor” to provide a rich deep semantic representation, which improves the accuracy of rumor source localization. The code is available at https://github.com/cgaocomp/CRSLL.