Structure-prior Informed Diffusion Model for Graph Source Localization with Limited Data

Source localization in graph information propagation is essential for mitigating network disruptions, including misinformation spread, cyber threats, and infrastructure failures. Existing deep generative approaches face significant challenges in real-world applications due to limited propagation data availability. We present SIDSL ($\mathbf{\text{S}}$tructure-prior $\mathbf{\text{I}}$nformed $\mathbf{\text{D}}$iffusion model for $\mathbf{\text{S}}$ource $\mathbf{\text{L}}$ocalization), a generative diffusion framework that leverages topology-aware priors to enable robust source localization with limited data. SIDSL addresses three key challenges: unknown propagation patterns through structure-based source estimations via graph label propagation, complex topology-propagation relationships via a propagation-enhanced conditional denoiser with GNN-parameterized label propagation module, and class imbalance through structure-prior biased diffusion initialization. By learning pattern-invariant features from synthetic data generated by established propagation models, SIDSL enables effective knowledge transfer to real-world scenarios. Experimental evaluation on four real-world datasets demonstrates superior performance with 7.5-13.3% F1 score improvements over baselines, including over 19% improvement in few-shot and 40% in zero-shot settings, validating the framework’s effectiveness for practical source localization. Our code can be found \href{https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/SIDSL}{here}.