Improving the Shortest Plank: Vulnerability-Aware Adversarial Training for Robust Recommender System

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Zhang, Kaike, Cao, Qi, Wu, Yunfan, Sun, Fei, Shen, Huawei, Cheng, Xueqi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866910620806283264
author Zhang, Kaike
Cao, Qi
Wu, Yunfan
Sun, Fei
Shen, Huawei
Cheng, Xueqi
author_facet Zhang, Kaike
Cao, Qi
Wu, Yunfan
Sun, Fei
Shen, Huawei
Cheng, Xueqi
contents Recommender systems play a pivotal role in mitigating information overload in various fields. Nonetheless, the inherent openness of these systems introduces vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to insert fake users into the system's training data to skew the exposure of certain items, known as poisoning attacks. Adversarial training has emerged as a notable defense mechanism against such poisoning attacks within recommender systems. Existing adversarial training methods apply perturbations of the same magnitude across all users to enhance system robustness against attacks. Yet, in reality, we find that attacks often affect only a subset of users who are vulnerable. These perturbations of indiscriminate magnitude make it difficult to balance effective protection for vulnerable users without degrading recommendation quality for those who are not affected. To address this issue, our research delves into understanding user vulnerability. Considering that poisoning attacks pollute the training data, we note that the higher degree to which a recommender system fits users' training data correlates with an increased likelihood of users incorporating attack information, indicating their vulnerability. Leveraging these insights, we introduce the Vulnerability-aware Adversarial Training (VAT), designed to defend against poisoning attacks in recommender systems. VAT employs a novel vulnerability-aware function to estimate users' vulnerability based on the degree to which the system fits them. Guided by this estimation, VAT applies perturbations of adaptive magnitude to each user, not only reducing the success ratio of attacks but also preserving, and potentially enhancing, the quality of recommendations. Comprehensive experiments confirm VAT's superior defensive capabilities across different recommendation models and against various types of attacks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_17476
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving the Shortest Plank: Vulnerability-Aware Adversarial Training for Robust Recommender System
Zhang, Kaike
Cao, Qi
Wu, Yunfan
Sun, Fei
Shen, Huawei
Cheng, Xueqi
Information Retrieval
Recommender systems play a pivotal role in mitigating information overload in various fields. Nonetheless, the inherent openness of these systems introduces vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to insert fake users into the system's training data to skew the exposure of certain items, known as poisoning attacks. Adversarial training has emerged as a notable defense mechanism against such poisoning attacks within recommender systems. Existing adversarial training methods apply perturbations of the same magnitude across all users to enhance system robustness against attacks. Yet, in reality, we find that attacks often affect only a subset of users who are vulnerable. These perturbations of indiscriminate magnitude make it difficult to balance effective protection for vulnerable users without degrading recommendation quality for those who are not affected. To address this issue, our research delves into understanding user vulnerability. Considering that poisoning attacks pollute the training data, we note that the higher degree to which a recommender system fits users' training data correlates with an increased likelihood of users incorporating attack information, indicating their vulnerability. Leveraging these insights, we introduce the Vulnerability-aware Adversarial Training (VAT), designed to defend against poisoning attacks in recommender systems. VAT employs a novel vulnerability-aware function to estimate users' vulnerability based on the degree to which the system fits them. Guided by this estimation, VAT applies perturbations of adaptive magnitude to each user, not only reducing the success ratio of attacks but also preserving, and potentially enhancing, the quality of recommendations. Comprehensive experiments confirm VAT's superior defensive capabilities across different recommendation models and against various types of attacks.
title Improving the Shortest Plank: Vulnerability-Aware Adversarial Training for Robust Recommender System
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.17476