On Measuring Unnoticeability of Graph Adversarial Attacks: Observations, New Measure, and Applications

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Jo, Hyeonsoo, Hwang, Hyunjin, Bu, Fanchen, Lee, Soo Yong, Park, Chanyoung, Shin, Kijung
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Jo, Hyeonsoo
Hwang, Hyunjin
Bu, Fanchen
Lee, Soo Yong
Park, Chanyoung
Shin, Kijung
author_facet Jo, Hyeonsoo
Hwang, Hyunjin
Bu, Fanchen
Lee, Soo Yong
Park, Chanyoung
Shin, Kijung
contents Adversarial attacks are allegedly unnoticeable. Prior studies have designed attack noticeability measures on graphs, primarily using statistical tests to compare the topology of original and (possibly) attacked graphs. However, we observe two critical limitations in the existing measures. First, because the measures rely on simple rules, attackers can readily enhance their attacks to bypass them, reducing their attack "noticeability" and, yet, maintaining their attack performance. Second, because the measures naively leverage global statistics, such as degree distributions, they may entirely overlook attacks until severe perturbations occur, letting the attacks be almost "totally unnoticeable." To address the limitations, we introduce HideNSeek, a learnable measure for graph attack noticeability. First, to mitigate the bypass problem, HideNSeek learns to distinguish the original and (potential) attack edges using a learnable edge scorer (LEO), which scores each edge on its likelihood of being an attack. Second, to mitigate the overlooking problem, HideNSeek conducts imbalance-aware aggregation of all the edge scores to obtain the final noticeability score. Using six real-world graphs, we empirically demonstrate that HideNSeek effectively alleviates the observed limitations, and LEO (i.e., our learnable edge scorer) outperforms eleven competitors in distinguishing attack edges under five different attack methods. For an additional application, we show that LEO boost the performance of robust GNNs by removing attack-like edges.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_05015
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Measuring Unnoticeability of Graph Adversarial Attacks: Observations, New Measure, and Applications
Jo, Hyeonsoo
Hwang, Hyunjin
Bu, Fanchen
Lee, Soo Yong
Park, Chanyoung
Shin, Kijung
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Adversarial attacks are allegedly unnoticeable. Prior studies have designed attack noticeability measures on graphs, primarily using statistical tests to compare the topology of original and (possibly) attacked graphs. However, we observe two critical limitations in the existing measures. First, because the measures rely on simple rules, attackers can readily enhance their attacks to bypass them, reducing their attack "noticeability" and, yet, maintaining their attack performance. Second, because the measures naively leverage global statistics, such as degree distributions, they may entirely overlook attacks until severe perturbations occur, letting the attacks be almost "totally unnoticeable." To address the limitations, we introduce HideNSeek, a learnable measure for graph attack noticeability. First, to mitigate the bypass problem, HideNSeek learns to distinguish the original and (potential) attack edges using a learnable edge scorer (LEO), which scores each edge on its likelihood of being an attack. Second, to mitigate the overlooking problem, HideNSeek conducts imbalance-aware aggregation of all the edge scores to obtain the final noticeability score. Using six real-world graphs, we empirically demonstrate that HideNSeek effectively alleviates the observed limitations, and LEO (i.e., our learnable edge scorer) outperforms eleven competitors in distinguishing attack edges under five different attack methods. For an additional application, we show that LEO boost the performance of robust GNNs by removing attack-like edges.
title On Measuring Unnoticeability of Graph Adversarial Attacks: Observations, New Measure, and Applications
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05015