Evading Overlapping Community Detection via Proxy Node Injection

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Loi, Dario, Silvestri, Matteo, Silvestri, Fabrizio, Tolomei, Gabriele
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Loi, Dario
Silvestri, Matteo
Silvestri, Fabrizio
Tolomei, Gabriele
author_facet Loi, Dario
Silvestri, Matteo
Silvestri, Fabrizio
Tolomei, Gabriele
contents Protecting privacy in social graphs requires preventing sensitive information, such as community affiliations, from being inferred by graph analysis, without substantially altering the graph topology. We address this through the problem of \emph{community membership hiding} (CMH), which seeks edge modifications that cause a target node to exit its original community, regardless of the detection algorithm employed. Prior work has focused on non-overlapping community detection, where trivial strategies often suffice, but real-world graphs are better modeled by overlapping communities, where such strategies fail. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to formalize and address CMH in this setting. In this work, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach that learns effective modification policies, including the use of proxy nodes, while preserving graph structure. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines in both effectiveness and efficiency, offering a principled tool for privacy-preserving graph modification with overlapping communities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_21211
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evading Overlapping Community Detection via Proxy Node Injection
Loi, Dario
Silvestri, Matteo
Silvestri, Fabrizio
Tolomei, Gabriele
Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.6; I.2.8; G.2.2; I.5.1
Protecting privacy in social graphs requires preventing sensitive information, such as community affiliations, from being inferred by graph analysis, without substantially altering the graph topology. We address this through the problem of \emph{community membership hiding} (CMH), which seeks edge modifications that cause a target node to exit its original community, regardless of the detection algorithm employed. Prior work has focused on non-overlapping community detection, where trivial strategies often suffice, but real-world graphs are better modeled by overlapping communities, where such strategies fail. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to formalize and address CMH in this setting. In this work, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach that learns effective modification policies, including the use of proxy nodes, while preserving graph structure. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines in both effectiveness and efficiency, offering a principled tool for privacy-preserving graph modification with overlapping communities.
title Evading Overlapping Community Detection via Proxy Node Injection
topic Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.6; I.2.8; G.2.2; I.5.1
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21211