GKD-Recruiter: Jointly Modeling Social and Task Heterogeneity for Spatial Crowdsourcing via Graph Knowledge Distillation

Social recruitment offers a solution to worker scarcity in Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC) but faces challenges that are often ignored in traditional Influence Maximization. First, task heterogeneity arising from offline execution constraints breaks the interest-implies-participation assumption, as social influence often fails to translate into physical presence. Second, finite task demand creates a saturation trap, a non-submodular setting in which utility drops sharply to zero once demand is met. To bridge these gaps, we propose GKD-Recruiter, a Task-Aware framework designed to maximize Effective Task Satisfaction (ETS). We explicitly model the complex worker-task affinity via a heterogeneous graph and capture directional social influence using a novel Influential GAT. To robustly fuse these distinct signals, we introduce a Graph Knowledge Distillation mechanism. Furthermore, we employ Rainbow DQN to navigate the non-submodular combinatorial search space, avoiding the local optima that trap greedy heuristics. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that GKD-Recruiter significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both solution quality and inference efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/GaoYucen/GKD-Recruiter.