Information Obfuscation of Graph Neural Networks

Peiyuan Liao, Han Zhao, Keyulu Xu, Tommi Jaakkola, Geoffrey Gordon, Stefanie Jegelka, Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

26 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2021
PublisherML Research Press
Pages6600-6610
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781713845065
StatePublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event38th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 18 Jul 202124 Jul 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings of Machine Learning Research
Volume139
ISSN (Electronic)2640-3498

Conference

Conference38th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period18/07/2124/07/21

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