Inferring Sensitive Attributes from Knowledge Graph Embeddings: Attack and Defense Strategies

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Hayder, Yasmine
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911698319835136
author Hayder, Yasmine
author_facet Hayder, Yasmine
contents Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are a powerful representation of linked data, offering flexibility, semantic richness, and support for knowledge enrichment and reasoning. They help data owners organize and exploit heterogeneous data to provide insightful services (e.g., recommendations), yet real-world KGs are often incomplete, hiding true facts or missing valuable insights. Knowledge graph embedding techniques are commonly used to infer valuable missing information. However, reasoning over KGs can inadvertently expose sensitive user information, even when such data is not explicitly stored. In this work, we investigate the privacy risks associated with KGE-based reasoning, focusing on attribute inference attacks where adversaries attempt to deduce sensitive user attributes from seemingly non-sensitive outputs. We propose and evaluate a framework that mitigates these privacy risks by applying post processing sanitization techniques to KGE outputs. Preliminary results demonstrate the effectiveness of these attacks on the outputs of KGE models, and explore the trade-off between recommendation quality and privacy protection when applying randomization based approaches, highlighting the need to experiment with more advanced techniques in future work to address this issue.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_19644
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Inferring Sensitive Attributes from Knowledge Graph Embeddings: Attack and Defense Strategies
Hayder, Yasmine
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are a powerful representation of linked data, offering flexibility, semantic richness, and support for knowledge enrichment and reasoning. They help data owners organize and exploit heterogeneous data to provide insightful services (e.g., recommendations), yet real-world KGs are often incomplete, hiding true facts or missing valuable insights. Knowledge graph embedding techniques are commonly used to infer valuable missing information. However, reasoning over KGs can inadvertently expose sensitive user information, even when such data is not explicitly stored. In this work, we investigate the privacy risks associated with KGE-based reasoning, focusing on attribute inference attacks where adversaries attempt to deduce sensitive user attributes from seemingly non-sensitive outputs. We propose and evaluate a framework that mitigates these privacy risks by applying post processing sanitization techniques to KGE outputs. Preliminary results demonstrate the effectiveness of these attacks on the outputs of KGE models, and explore the trade-off between recommendation quality and privacy protection when applying randomization based approaches, highlighting the need to experiment with more advanced techniques in future work to address this issue.
title Inferring Sensitive Attributes from Knowledge Graph Embeddings: Attack and Defense Strategies
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19644