Robust Graph Fine-Tuning with Adversarial Graph Prompting
Ziyan Zhang , Bo Jiang , Jin Tang
Published on arXiv
2601.00229
Input Manipulation Attack
OWASP ML Top 10 — ML01
Key Finding
AGP exhibits consistently minimal ROC-AUC degradation under node, topology, and hybrid adversarial attacks, while existing PEFT baselines (GPF, LoRA, AdapterGNN) show large performance drops on BACE and TOX21.
Adversarial Graph Prompting (AGP) / JointPGD
Novel technique introduced
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method has emerged as a dominant paradigm for adapting pre-trained GNN models to downstream tasks. However, existing PEFT methods usually exhibit significant vulnerability to various noise and attacks on graph topology and node attributes/features. To address this issue, for the first time, we propose integrating adversarial learning into graph prompting and develop a novel Adversarial Graph Prompting (AGP) framework to achieve robust graph fine-tuning. Our AGP has two key aspects. First, we propose the general problem formulation of AGP as a min-max optimization problem and develop an alternating optimization scheme to solve it. For inner maximization, we propose Joint Projected Gradient Descent (JointPGD) algorithm to generate strong adversarial noise. For outer minimization, we employ a simple yet effective module to learn the optimal node prompts to counteract the adversarial noise. Second, we demonstrate that the proposed AGP can theoretically address both graph topology and node noise. This confirms the versatility and robustness of our AGP fine-tuning method across various graph noise. Note that, the proposed AGP is a general method that can be integrated with various pre-trained GNN models to enhance their robustness on the downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark tasks validate the robustness and effectiveness of AGP method compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Key Contributions
- AGP framework that integrates adversarial learning into graph prompting via a min-max optimization formulation for robust PEFT of pre-trained GNNs
- JointPGD algorithm that jointly generates adversarial perturbations on both graph topology and node features simultaneously
- Theoretical analysis proving that AGP provably improves robustness against both topology and node-feature noise
🛡️ Threat Analysis
Paper defends against adversarial input manipulation — specifically crafted perturbations on graph topology and node features that degrade GNN performance. The JointPGD algorithm generates adversarial examples and the AGP framework uses adversarial training (min-max optimization) as a defense, fitting squarely in the adversarial robustness / input manipulation defense category.