Leveraging Trustworthy Node Attributes for Effective Network Alignment

Abstract

With the prevalence of social media platforms, accurately identifying the same users across different networks through network alignment has become crucial. Existing methods often struggle due to sparse or absent user-identifiable information (node attributes), highlighting the need for augmenting node attributes. However, research on attribute augmentation remains largely under-explored. In this study, we aim to design augmented attributes that enhance network alignment by reflecting three key structural <u> C </u>haracteristics: (C1) global structural characteristic, reflects the global network structure; (C2) seed-based structural characteristic, leverages cross-network structural information associated with seed nodes; (C3) multi-aspect structural characteristic, employs diverse structural relationship measures. To this end, we propose a novel approach for designing trustworthy Augmented Seed-baSed and multI-aspect STructurAl iNformaTion (ASSISTANT) attributes. To enhance alignment performance, we also present a learning module that utilizes a gate mechanism to select the most effective measure dynamically. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate the following: 1) Our network alignment framework, which includes a gate mechanism module, significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in alignment accuracy; 2) other state-of-the-art methods using ASSISTANT attributes as input substantially boosts their own alignment accuracy; and 3) using only ASSISTANT attributes without any training process also leads to effective alignment, showcasing their high trustworthiness.