No Arabic abstract
While the advent of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has greatly improved node and graph representation learning in many applications, the neighborhood aggregation scheme exposes additional vulnerabilities to adversaries seeking to extract node-level information about sensitive attributes. In this paper, we study the problem of protecting sensitive attributes by information obfuscation when learning with graph structured data. We propose a framework to locally filter out pre-determined sensitive attributes via adversarial training with the total variation and the Wasserstein distance. Our method creates a strong defense against inference attacks, while only suffering small loss in task performance. Theoretically, we analyze the effectiveness of our framework against a worst-case adversary, and characterize an inherent trade-off between maximizing predictive accuracy and minimizing information leakage. Experiments across multiple datasets from recommender systems, knowledge graphs and quantum chemistry demonstrate that the proposed approach provides a robust defense across various graph structures and tasks, while producing competitive GNN encoders for downstream tasks.
We study how neural networks trained by gradient descent extrapolate, i.e., what they learn outside the support of the training distribution. Previous works report mixed empirical results when extrapolating with neural networks: while feedforward neural networks, a.k.a. multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), do not extrapolate well in certain simple tasks, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) -- structured networks with MLP modules -- have shown some success in more complex tasks. Working towards a theoretical explanation, we identify conditions under which MLPs and GNNs extrapolate well. First, we quantify the observation that ReLU MLPs quickly converge to linear functions along any direction from the origin, which implies that ReLU MLPs do not extrapolate most nonlinear functions. But, they can provably learn a linear target function when the training distribution is sufficiently diverse. Second, in connection to analyzing the successes and limitations of GNNs, these results suggest a hypothesis for which we provide theoretical and empirical evidence: the success of GNNs in extrapolating algorithmic tasks to new data (e.g., larger graphs or edge weights) relies on encoding task-specific non-linearities in the architecture or features. Our theoretical analysis builds on a connection of over-parameterized networks to the neural tangent kernel. Empirically, our theory holds across different training settings.
Splitting network computations between the edge device and a server enables low edge-compute inference of neural networks but might expose sensitive information about the test query to the server. To address this problem, existing techniques train the model to minimize information leakage for a given set of sensitive attributes. In practice, however, the test queries might contain attributes that are not foreseen during training. We propose instead an unsupervised obfuscation method to discard the information irrelevant to the main task. We formulate the problem via an information theoretical framework and derive an analytical solution for a given distortion to the model output. In our method, the edge device runs the model up to a split layer determined based on its computational capacity. It then obfuscates the obtained feature vector based on the first layer of the server model by removing the components in the null space as well as the low-energy components of the remaining signal. Our experimental results show that our method outperforms existing techniques in removing the information of the irrelevant attributes and maintaining the accuracy on the target label. We also show that our method reduces the communication cost and incurs only a small computational overhead.
While many existing graph neural networks (GNNs) have been proven to perform $ell_2$-based graph smoothing that enforces smoothness globally, in this work we aim to further enhance the local smoothness adaptivity of GNNs via $ell_1$-based graph smoothing. As a result, we introduce a family of GNNs (Elastic GNNs) based on $ell_1$ and $ell_2$-based graph smoothing. In particular, we propose a novel and general message passing scheme into GNNs. This message passing algorithm is not only friendly to back-propagation training but also achieves the desired smoothing properties with a theoretical convergence guarantee. Experiments on semi-supervised learning tasks demonstrate that the proposed Elastic GNNs obtain better adaptivity on benchmark datasets and are significantly robust to graph adversarial attacks. The implementation of Elastic GNNs is available at url{https://github.com/lxiaorui/ElasticGNN}.
A variety of graph neural networks (GNNs) frameworks for representation learning on graphs have been recently developed. These frameworks rely on aggregation and iteration scheme to learn the representation of nodes. However, information between nodes is inevitably lost in the scheme during learning. In order to reduce the loss, we extend the GNNs frameworks by exploring the aggregation and iteration scheme in the methodology of mutual information. We propose a new approach of enlarging the normal neighborhood in the aggregation of GNNs, which aims at maximizing mutual information. Based on a series of experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets, we show that the proposed approach improves the state-of-the-art performance for four types of graph tasks, including supervised and semi-supervised graph classification, graph link prediction and graph edge generation and classification.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been shown with superior performance in various applications, but training dedicated GNNs can be costly for large-scale graphs. Some recent work started to study the pre-training of GNNs. However, none of them provide theoretical insights into the design of their frameworks, or clear requirements and guarantees towards the transferability of GNNs. In this work, we establish a theoretically grounded and practically useful framework for the transfer learning of GNNs. Firstly, we propose a novel view towards the essential graph information and advocate the capturing of it as the goal of transferable GNN training, which motivates the design of Ours, a novel GNN framework based on ego-graph information maximization to analytically achieve this goal. Secondly, we specify the requirement of structure-respecting node features as the GNN input, and derive a rigorous bound of GNN transferability based on the difference between the local graph Laplacians of the source and target graphs. Finally, we conduct controlled synthetic experiments to directly justify our theoretical conclusions. Extensive experiments on real-world networks towards role identification show consistent results in the rigorously analyzed setting of direct-transfering, while those towards large-scale relation prediction show promising results in the more generalized and practical setting of transfering with fine-tuning.