Expressivity of Graph Neural Networks Through the Lens of Adversarial Robustness

Francesco Campi, Lukas Gosch, Tom Wollschläger, Yan Scholten, Stephan Günnemann

Keywords: Adversarial Robustness, Graph Neural Networks, Subgraph Counting, Representation Power

TL;DR: We perform the first adversarial robustness study into Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that are provably more powerful than traditional Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs).

Abstract: We perform the first adversarial robustness study into Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that are provably more powerful than traditional Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs). In particular, we use adversarial robustness as a tool to uncover a significant gap between their theoretically possible and empirically achieved expressive power. To do so, we focus on the ability of GNNs to count specific subgraph patterns, which is an established measure of expressivity, and extend the concept of adversarial robustness to this task. Based on this, we develop efficient adversarial attacks for subgraph counting and show that more powerful GNNs fail to generalize even to small perturbations to the graph's structure. Expanding on this, we show that such architectures also fail to count substructures on out-of-distribution graphs.

Submission Number: 98