Learning Policies for Effective Incentive Allocation in Unknown Social Networks

Most existing incentive allocation approaches rely on sufficient information about users' attributes, such as their preferences, followers in the social network, and activities, to customize effective incentives. However, this may lead to failure when such knowledge is unavailable. In this light, we propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning-based framework, named Geometric Actor-Critic (GAC), to discover effective incentive allocation policies towards users in a social network. More specifically, given a limited budget, the proposed approach can extract information from a high-level network representation for learning effective incentive allocation policies. The proposed GAC only requires the topology of the social network and does not rely on any prior information about users' attributes. We use three real-world social network datasets to evaluate the performance of the proposed GAC. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.