Quantifying the Noise of Structural Perturbations on Graph Adversarial Attacks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fang, Junyuan, Yang, Han, Wen, Haixian, Wu, Jiajing, Zheng, Zibin, Tse, Chi K.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Fang, Junyuan
Yang, Han
Wen, Haixian
Wu, Jiajing
Zheng, Zibin
Tse, Chi K.
author_facet Fang, Junyuan
Yang, Han
Wen, Haixian
Wu, Jiajing
Zheng, Zibin
Tse, Chi K.
contents Graph neural networks have been widely utilized to solve graph-related tasks because of their strong learning power in utilizing the local information of neighbors. However, recent studies on graph adversarial attacks have proven that current graph neural networks are not robust against malicious attacks. Yet much of the existing work has focused on the optimization objective based on attack performance to obtain (near) optimal perturbations, but paid less attention to the strength quantification of each perturbation such as the injection of a particular node/link, which makes the choice of perturbations a black-box model that lacks interpretability. In this work, we propose the concept of noise to quantify the attack strength of each adversarial link. Furthermore, we propose three attack strategies based on the defined noise and classification margins in terms of single and multiple steps optimization. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets against three representative graph neural networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attack strategies. Particularly, we also investigate the preferred patterns of effective adversarial perturbations by analyzing the corresponding properties of the selected perturbation nodes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_20869
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Quantifying the Noise of Structural Perturbations on Graph Adversarial Attacks
Fang, Junyuan
Yang, Han
Wen, Haixian
Wu, Jiajing
Zheng, Zibin
Tse, Chi K.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Graph neural networks have been widely utilized to solve graph-related tasks because of their strong learning power in utilizing the local information of neighbors. However, recent studies on graph adversarial attacks have proven that current graph neural networks are not robust against malicious attacks. Yet much of the existing work has focused on the optimization objective based on attack performance to obtain (near) optimal perturbations, but paid less attention to the strength quantification of each perturbation such as the injection of a particular node/link, which makes the choice of perturbations a black-box model that lacks interpretability. In this work, we propose the concept of noise to quantify the attack strength of each adversarial link. Furthermore, we propose three attack strategies based on the defined noise and classification margins in terms of single and multiple steps optimization. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets against three representative graph neural networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attack strategies. Particularly, we also investigate the preferred patterns of effective adversarial perturbations by analyzing the corresponding properties of the selected perturbation nodes.
title Quantifying the Noise of Structural Perturbations on Graph Adversarial Attacks
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20869