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Graph Integrated Transformers for Community Detection in Social Networks

Published: January 7, 2026 | arXiv ID: 2601.04367v1

By: Heba Zahran, M. Omair Shafiq

Potential Business Impact:

Finds hidden groups in online friend networks.

Business Areas:
Power Grid Energy

Community detection is crucial for applications like targeted marketing and recommendation systems. Traditional methods rely on network structure, and embedding-based models integrate semantic information. However, there is a challenge when a model leverages local and global information from complex structures like social networks. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers have shown superior performance in capturing local and global relationships. In this paper, We propose Graph Integrated Transformer for Community Detection (GIT-CD), a hybrid model combining GNNs and Transformer-based attention mechanisms to enhance community detection in social networks. Specifically, the GNN module captures local graph structures, while the Transformer module models long-range dependencies. A self-optimizing clustering module refines community assignments using K-Means, silhouette loss, and KL divergence minimization. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that GIT-CD outperforms state-of-the-art models, making it a robust approach for detecting meaningful communities in complex social networks.

Country of Origin
🇨🇦 Canada

Page Count
6 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Social and Information Networks