On Stealing Graph Neural Network Models
Marcin Podhajski, Jan Dubiński, Franziska Boenisch et al. · Polish Academy of Sciences · IDEAS NCBR +5 more
Marcin Podhajski, Jan Dubiński, Franziska Boenisch et al. · Polish Academy of Sciences · IDEAS NCBR +5 more
Steals GNN models with as few as 100 queries by decoupling query-free backbone extraction from strategic head extraction
Current graph neural network (GNN) model-stealing methods rely heavily on queries to the victim model, assuming no hard query limits. However, in reality, the number of allowed queries can be severely limited. In this paper, we demonstrate how an adversary can extract a GNN with very limited interactions with the model. Our approach first enables the adversary to obtain the model backbone without making direct queries to the victim model and then to strategically utilize a fixed query limit to extract the most informative data. The experiments on eight real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the attack, even under a very restricted query limit and under defense against model extraction in place. Our findings underscore the need for robust defenses against GNN model extraction threats.
Katarzyna Filus, Jorge M. Cruz-Duarte · Polish Academy of Sciences · University of Lille +3 more
Semantically guided target label selection using BERT/CLIP/TinyLLAMA improves adversarial benchmarking interpretability and scalability over WordNet
In targeted adversarial attacks on vision models, the selection of the target label is a critical yet often overlooked determinant of attack success. This target label corresponds to the class that the attacker aims to force the model to predict. Now, existing strategies typically rely on randomness, model predictions, or static semantic resources, limiting interpretability, reproducibility, or flexibility. This paper then proposes a semantics-guided framework for adversarial target selection using the cross-modal knowledge transfer from pretrained language and vision-language models. We evaluate several state-of-the-art models (BERT, TinyLLAMA, and CLIP) as similarity sources to select the most and least semantically related labels with respect to the ground truth, forming best- and worst-case adversarial scenarios. Our experiments on three vision models and five attack methods reveal that these models consistently render practical adversarial targets and surpass static lexical databases, such as WordNet, particularly for distant class relationships. We also observe that static testing of target labels offers a preliminary assessment of the effectiveness of similarity sources, \textit{a priori} testing. Our results corroborate the suitability of pretrained models for constructing interpretable, standardized, and scalable adversarial benchmarks across architectures and datasets.