Enhancing Robustness of Graph Neural Networks on Social Media with Explainable Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Yuefei Lyu, Chaozhuo Li, Sihong Xie, Xi Zhang

Keywords: graph adverisarial attack, reinforcement learning, inverse reinforcement learning, graph neural networks

Abstract: Adversarial attacks against graph neural networks (GNNs) through perturbations of the graph structure are increasingly common in social network tasks like rumor detection. Social media platforms capture diverse attack sequence samples through both machine and manual screening processes. Investigating effective ways to leverage these adversarial samples to enhance robustness is imperative. We improve the maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) method with the mixture-of-experts approach to address multi-source graph adversarial attacks. This method reconstructs the attack policy, integrating various attack models and providing feature-level explanations, subsequently generating additional adversarial samples to fortify the robustness of detection models. We develop precise sample guidance and a bidirectional update mechanism to reduce the deviation caused by imprecise feature representation and negative sampling within the large action space of social graphs, while also accelerating policy learning. We take rumor detector as an example targeted GNN model on real-world rumor datasets. By utilizing a small subset of samples generated by various graph adversarial attack methods, we reconstruct the attack policy, closely approximating the performance of the original attack method. We validate that samples generated by the learned policy enhance model robustness through adversarial training and data augmentation.

Primary Area: Graph neural networks

Submission Number: 14020