Commonality Augmented Disentanglement for Multimodal Crowdfunding Success Prediction

Online crowdfunding platforms have been gaining increasing popularity due to their convenience in soliciting social capital from the public. These platforms offer valuable opportunities for fundraisers to bring their creative products to life and support pro-social projects. However, the relatively low success rate of crowdfunding campaigns highlights the need for better strategies. While existing studies have explored various factors that contribute to crowdfunding success, they often overlook the intricate relationships between different aspects of crowdfunding. In this paper, we propose a novel model called Commonality Augmented Multimodal Disentanglement (CAMD) for predicting crowdfunding success. It can disentangle the roles of different data modalities, separating common factors from specific ones. Besides, we enhance the disentangled commonality using an augmentation network to achieve balanced representation of the skewed interrelations between different modalities. At last, we introduce a cross-attention-based multimodal fusion mechanism that further improves model performance by highlighting the crucial role of crowdfunding attributes. Experiments conducted on two large-scale crowdfunding datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our model.

I. Introduction

Crowdfunding presents valuable opportunities for both individuals and entrepreneurs to raise capital from the public. However, crowdfunding projects face challenges such as a low success rate and difficulty in reaching their funding goals [1], [2]. This issue hinders the overall growth and potential of crowdfunding as a financing method. To address this challenge, the concept of crowdfunding success prediction has emerged, aiming to help fundraisers organize their campaigns more effectively [3], [4]. In addition, it can provide valuable insights to crowdfunding platforms, enabling them to make more accurate and strategic recommendations, ultimately enhancing their social impact and financial success [5], [6].