One Vertex Attack on Graph Neural Networks-based Spatiotemporal Forecasting

Fuqiang Liu, Luis Miranda Moreno, Lijun Sun

Keywords: adversarial attack, graph neural networks, spatiotemporal forecasting

Abstract: Spatiotemporal forecasting plays an essential role in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and numerous applications, such as route planning, navigation, and automatic driving. Deep Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks, which capture both spatial and temporal patterns, have achieved great success in traffic forecasting applications. Though Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been proven to be vulnerable to carefully designed perturbations in multiple domains like objection classification and graph classification, these adversarial works cannot be directly applied to spatiotemporal GNNs because of their causality and spatiotemporal mechanism. There is still a lack of studies on the vulnerability and robustness of spatiotemporal GNNs. Particularly, if spatiotemporal GNNs are vulnerable in real-world traffic applications, a hacker can easily cause serious traffic congestion and even a city-scale breakdown. To fill this gap, we design One Vertex Attack to break deep spatiotemporal GNNs by attacking a single one vertex. To achieve this, we apply the genetic algorithm with a universal attack method as the evaluation function to locate the weakest vertex; then perturbations are generated by solving an optimization problem with the inverse estimation. Empirical studies prove that perturbations in one vertex can be diffused into most of the graph when spatiotemporal GNNs are under One Vertex Attack.

One-sentence Summary: This paper proposes an adversarial attack method that is able to break GNN-based spatiotemporal forecasting models by poisoning only one vertex.

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