Enhancing Graph Classification Robustness with Singular Pooling

Sofiane ENNADIR, Oleg Smirnov, Yassine ABBAHADDOU, Lele Cao, Johannes F. Lutzeyer

Keywords: Adversarial Robustness, Graph Neural Networks

TL;DR: We theoretically study the effect of the pooling operation on adversarial robustness, which allows us to introduce RS-Pool, a new pooling method capable of smoothing the effect of attacks.

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved strong performance across a range of graph representation learning tasks, yet their adversarial robustness in graph classification remains underexplored compared to node classification. While most existing defenses focus on the message-passing component, this work investigates the overlooked role of pooling operations in shaping robustness. We present a theoretical analysis of standard flat pooling methods (sum, average and max), deriving upper bounds on their adversarial risk and identifying their vulnerabilities under different attack scenarios and graph structures. Motivated by these insights, we propose Robust Singular Pooling (RS-Pool), a novel pooling strategy that leverages the dominant singular vector of the node embedding matrix to construct a robust graph-level representation. We theoretically investigate the robustness of RS-Pool and interpret the resulting bound leading to improved understanding of our proposed pooling operator. While our analysis centers on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), RS-Pool is model-agnostic and can be implemented efficiently via power iteration. Empirical results on real-world benchmarks show that RS-Pool provides better robustness than the considered pooling methods when subject to state-of-the-art adversarial attacks while maintaining competitive clean accuracy.

Primary Area: Deep learning (e.g., architectures, generative models, optimization for deep networks, foundation models, LLMs)

Submission Number: 21325