A General Black-box Adversarial Attack on Graph-based Fake News Detectors

Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based fake news detectors apply various methods to construct graphs, aiming to learn distinctive news embeddings for classification. Since the construction details are unknown for attackers in a black-box scenario, it is unrealistic to conduct the classical adversarial attacks that require a specific adjacency matrix. In this paper, we propose the first general black-box adversarial attack framework, i.e., General Attack via Fake Social Interaction (GAFSI), against detectors based on different graph structures. Specifically, as sharing is an important social interaction for GNN-based fake news detectors to construct the graph, we simulate sharing behaviors to fool the detectors. Firstly, we propose a fraudster selection module to select engaged users leveraging local and global information. In addition, a post injection module guides the selected users to create shared relations by sending posts. The sharing records will be added to the social context, leading to a general attack against different detectors. Experimental results on empirical datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GAFSI.

GIN-SD: Source Detection in Graphs with Incomplete Nodes via Positional Encoding and Attentive Fusion

Source detection in graphs has demonstrated robust efficacy in the domain of rumor source identification. Although recent solutions have enhanced performance by leveraging deep neural networks, they often require complete user data. In this paper, we address a more challenging task, rumor source detection with incomplete user data, and propose a novel framework, i.e., Source Detection in Graphs with Incomplete Nodes via Positional Encoding and Attentive Fusion (GIN-SD), to tackle this challenge. Specifically, our approach utilizes a positional embedding module to distinguish nodes that are incomplete and employs a self-attention mechanism to focus on nodes with greater information transmission capacity. To mitigate the prediction bias caused by the significant disparity between the numbers of source and non-source nodes, we also introduce a class-balancing mechanism. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of GIN-SD and its superiority to state-of-the-art methods.

Advancing Adversarial Robustness Through Adversarial Logit Update

Deep Neural Networks are susceptible to adversarial perturbations. Adversarial training and adversarial purification are among the most widely recognized defense strategies. Although these methods have different underlying logic, both rely on absolute logit values to generate label predictions. In this study, we theoretically analyze the logit difference around successful adversarial attacks from a theoretical point of view and propose a new principle, namely Adversarial Logit Update (ALU), to infer adversarial sample's labels. Based on ALU, we introduce a new classification paradigm that utilizes pre- and post-purification logit differences for model's adversarial robustness boost. Without requiring adversarial or additional data for model training, our clean data synthesis model can be easily applied to various pre-trained models for both adversarial sample detection and ALU-based data classification. Extensive experiments on both CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and tiny-ImageNet datasets show that even with simple components, the proposed solution achieves superior robustness performance compared to state-of-the-art methods against a wide range of adversarial attacks. Our python implementation is submitted in our Supplementary document and will be published upon the paper's acceptance.

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks using Self-supervised Reciprocally Contrastive Learning

Heterogeneous graph neural network (HGNN) is a very popular technique for the modeling and analysis of heterogeneous graphs. Most existing HGNN-based approaches are supervised or semi-supervised learning methods requiring graphs to be annotated, which is costly and time-consuming. Self-supervised contrastive learning has been proposed to address the problem of requiring annotated data by mining intrinsic information hidden within the given data. However, the existing contrastive learning methods are inadequate for heterogeneous graphs because they construct contrastive views only based on data perturbation or pre-defined structural properties (e.g., meta-path) in graph data while ignore the noises that may exist in both node attributes and graph topologies. We develop for the first time a novel and robust heterogeneous graph contrastive learning approach, namely HGCL, which introduces two views on respective guidance of node attributes and graph topologies and integrates and enhances them by reciprocally contrastive mechanism to better model heterogeneous graphs. In this new approach, we adopt distinct but most suitable attribute and topology fusion mechanisms in the two views, which are conducive to mining relevant information in attributes and topologies separately. We further use both attribute similarity and topological correlation to construct high-quality contrastive samples. Extensive experiments on three large real-world heterogeneous graphs demonstrate the superiority and robustness of HGCL over state-of-the-art methods.

Compactness Score: A Fast Filter Method for Unsupervised Feature Selection

For feature engineering, feature selection seems to be an important research content in which is anticipated to select "excellent" features from candidate ones. Different functions can be realized through feature selection, such as dimensionality reduction, model effect improvement, and model performance improvement. Along with the flourish of the information age, huge amounts of high-dimensional data are generated day by day, while we need to spare great efforts and time to label such data. Therefore, various algorithms are proposed to address such data, among which unsupervised feature selection has attracted tremendous interests. In many classification tasks, researchers found that data seem to be usually close to each other if they are from the same class; thus, local compactness is of great importance for the evaluation of a feature. In this manuscript, we propose a fast unsupervised feature selection method, named as, Compactness Score (CSUFS), to select desired features. To demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy, several data sets are chosen with intensive experiments being performed. Later, the effectiveness and superiority of our method are revealed through addressing clustering tasks. Here, the performance is indicated by several well-known evaluation metrics, while the efficiency is reflected by the corresponding running time. As revealed by the simulation results, our proposed algorithm seems to be more accurate and efficient compared with existing algorithms.