Curriculum Graph Poisoning

Hanwen Liu, Peilin Zhao, Tingyang Xu, Yatao Bian, Junzhou Huang, Yuesheng Zhu, Yadong Mu

Abstract: Despite the success of graph neural networks (GNNs) over the Web in recent years, the typical transductive learning setting for node classification requires GNNs to be retrained frequently, making them vulnerable to poisoning attacks by corrupting the training graph. Poisoning attacks on graphs are, however, non-trivial as the attack space is potentially large, and the discrete graph structure makes the poisoning function non-differentiable. In this paper, we revisit the bi-level optimization problem in graph poisoning and propose a novel graph poisoning method, termed Curriculum Graph Poisoning (CuGPo), inspired by curriculum learning. In contrast to other poisoning attacks that use heuristics or directly optimize the graph, our method learns to generate poisoned graphs from basic adversarial knowledge first and advanced knowledge later. Specifically, for the outer optimization, we utilize the slightly perturbed graphs which represent the easy poisoning task at the beginning, and then enlarge the attack space until the final; for the inner optimization, we firstly exploit the knowledge from the clean graph and then adapt quickly to perturbed graphs to obtain the adversarial knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CuGPo achieves state-of-the-art performance in graph poisoning attacks.