Accelerating the Surrogate Retraining for Poisoning Attacks against Recommender Systems

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Wu, Yunfan, Cao, Qi, Tao, Shuchang, Zhang, Kaike, Sun, Fei, Shen, Huawei
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866914917728124928
author Wu, Yunfan
Cao, Qi
Tao, Shuchang
Zhang, Kaike
Sun, Fei
Shen, Huawei
author_facet Wu, Yunfan
Cao, Qi
Tao, Shuchang
Zhang, Kaike
Sun, Fei
Shen, Huawei
contents Recent studies have demonstrated the vulnerability of recommender systems to data poisoning attacks, where adversaries inject carefully crafted fake user interactions into the training data of recommenders to promote target items. Current attack methods involve iteratively retraining a surrogate recommender on the poisoned data with the latest fake users to optimize the attack. However, this repetitive retraining is highly time-consuming, hindering the efficient assessment and optimization of fake users. To mitigate this computational bottleneck and develop a more effective attack in an affordable time, we analyze the retraining process and find that a change in the representation of one user/item will cause a cascading effect through the user-item interaction graph. Under theoretical guidance, we introduce \emph{Gradient Passing} (GP), a novel technique that explicitly passes gradients between interacted user-item pairs during backpropagation, thereby approximating the cascading effect and accelerating retraining. With just a single update, GP can achieve effects comparable to multiple original training iterations. Under the same number of retraining epochs, GP enables a closer approximation of the surrogate recommender to the victim. This more accurate approximation provides better guidance for optimizing fake users, ultimately leading to enhanced data poisoning attacks. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed GP.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_10666
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Accelerating the Surrogate Retraining for Poisoning Attacks against Recommender Systems
Wu, Yunfan
Cao, Qi
Tao, Shuchang
Zhang, Kaike
Sun, Fei
Shen, Huawei
Information Retrieval
Recent studies have demonstrated the vulnerability of recommender systems to data poisoning attacks, where adversaries inject carefully crafted fake user interactions into the training data of recommenders to promote target items. Current attack methods involve iteratively retraining a surrogate recommender on the poisoned data with the latest fake users to optimize the attack. However, this repetitive retraining is highly time-consuming, hindering the efficient assessment and optimization of fake users. To mitigate this computational bottleneck and develop a more effective attack in an affordable time, we analyze the retraining process and find that a change in the representation of one user/item will cause a cascading effect through the user-item interaction graph. Under theoretical guidance, we introduce \emph{Gradient Passing} (GP), a novel technique that explicitly passes gradients between interacted user-item pairs during backpropagation, thereby approximating the cascading effect and accelerating retraining. With just a single update, GP can achieve effects comparable to multiple original training iterations. Under the same number of retraining epochs, GP enables a closer approximation of the surrogate recommender to the victim. This more accurate approximation provides better guidance for optimizing fake users, ultimately leading to enhanced data poisoning attacks. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed GP.
title Accelerating the Surrogate Retraining for Poisoning Attacks against Recommender Systems
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10666