The prevalence of social media has greatly catalyzed the dissemination and proliferation of online memes (e.g., ideas, topics, melodies, and tags). However, this information abundance is exceeding the capability of online users to consume it. Ranking memes based on their popularities could promote online advertisement and content distribution. Despite such importance, few existing work can solve this problem well. They are either daunted by unpractical assumptions or incapability of characterizing dynamic information. As such, in this paper, we elaborate a model-free scheme to rank online memes in the context of social media. This scheme is capable to characterize the nonlinear interactions of online users, which mark the process of meme diffusion. Empirical studies on two large-scale, real-world datasets (one in English and one in Chinese) demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed scheme. In addition, due to its fine-grained modeling of user dynamics, this ranking scheme can also be utilized to explain meme popularity through the lens of social influence.

社交媒体的盛行极大地促进了在线模因（例如，思想，主题，旋律和标签）的传播和扩散。但是，这种信息丰富程度超出了在线用户使用它的能力。根据模因的流行度对模因进行排名可以促进在线广告和内容分发。尽管如此重要，但现有的工作很少能很好地解决这个问题。他们要么因不切实际的假设而畏缩，要么因无法描述动态信息而无所适从。因此，在本文中，我们精心设计了一种无模型方案，可以在社交媒体的背景下对在线模因进行排名。该方案能够表征在线用户的非线性相互作用，这标志着模因的扩散过程。关于两个大规模的实证研究，真实的数据集（英语一个，中文一个）证明了该方案的有效性和鲁棒性。此外，由于其精细的用户动态建模，该排名方案还可以用于通过社会影响的角度来解释模因受欢迎程度。