Unsupervised Adversarially-Robust Representation Learning on Graphs

Recent works have demonstrated that deep learning on graphs is vulnerable to adversarial attacks, in that imperceptible perturbations on input data can lead to dramatic performance deterioration. In this paper, we focus on the underlying problem of learning robust representations on graphs via mutual information. In contrast to previous works measure the task-specific robustness based on the label space, we here take advantage of the representation space to study a task-free robustness measure given the joint input space w.r.t graph topology and node attributes. We formulate this problem as a constrained saddle point optimization problem and solve it efficiently in a reduced search space. Furthermore, we provably establish theoretical connections between our task-free robustness measure and the robustness of downstream classifiers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method is able to enhance robustness against adversarial attacks on graphs, yet even increases natural accuracy.