AUTHOR=Tzoumanekas Georgios , Chatzianastasis Michail , Ilias Loukas , Kiokes George , Psarras John , Askounis Dimitris 

TITLE=A graph neural architecture search approach for identifying bots in social media

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence

VOLUME=Volume 7 - 2024

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2024.1509179

DOI=10.3389/frai.2024.1509179

ISSN=2624-8212

ABSTRACT=Social media platforms, including X, Facebook, and Instagram, host millions of daily users, giving rise to bots automated programs disseminating misinformation and ideologies with tangible real-world consequences. While bot detection in platform X has been the area of many deep learning models with adequate results, most approaches neglect the graph structure of social media relationships and often rely on hand-engineered architectures. Our work introduces the implementation of a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) technique, namely Deep and Flexible Graph Neural Architecture Search (DFG-NAS), tailored to Relational Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (RGCNs) in the task of bot detection in platform X. Our model constructs a graph that incorporates both the user relationships and their metadata. Then, DFG-NAS is adapted to automatically search for the optimal configuration of Propagation and Transformation functions in the RGCNs. Our experiments are conducted on the TwiBot-20 dataset, constructing a graph with 229,580 nodes and 227,979 edges. We study the five architectures with the highest performance during the search and achieve an accuracy of 85.7%, surpassing state-of-the-art models. Our approach not only addresses the bot detection challenge but also advocates for the broader implementation of NAS models in neural network design automation.