Relaxing Graph Transformers for Adversarial Attacks

Existing studies have shown that Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Even though Graph Transformers (GTs) surpassed Message-Passing GNNs on several benchmarks, their adversarial robustness properties are unexplored. However, attacking GTs is challenging due to their Positional Encodings (PEs) and special attention mechanisms which can be difficult to differentiate. We overcome these challenges by targeting three representative architectures based on (1) random-walk PEs, (2) pair-wise-shortest-path PEs, and (3) spectral PEs - and propose the first adaptive attacks for GTs. We leverage our attacks to evaluate robustness to (a) structure perturbations on node classification; and (b) node injection attacks for (fake-news) graph classification. Our evaluation reveals that they can be catastrophically fragile and underlines our work's importance and the necessity for adaptive attacks.