Anchoring Trends: Mitigating Social Media Popularity Prediction Drift via Feature Clustering and Expansion

摘要

Predicting online video popularity faces a critical challenge: prediction drift, where models trained on historical data rapidly degrade due to evolving viral trends and user behaviors. To address this temporal distribution shift, we propose an Anchored Multi-modal Clustering and Feature Generation (AMCFG) framework that discovers temporally-invariant patterns across data distributions. Our approach employs multi-modal clustering to reveal content structure, then leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate semantic Anchor Features-high-level concepts such as audience demographics, content themes, and engagement patterns-that transcend superficial trend variations. These semantic anchors, combined with cluster-derived statistical features, enable prediction based on stable principles rather than ephemeral signals. Experiments demonstrate that AMCFG significantly enhances both predictive accuracy and temporal robustness, achieving superior performance on out-of-distribution data and providing a viable solution for real-world video popularity prediction.