Towards Generalization Bounds of GCNs for Adversarially Robust Node Classification

Adversarially robust generalization of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) has garnered significant attention in various security-sensitive application areas, driven by intrinsic adversarial vulnerability. Albeit remarkable empirical advancement, theoretical understanding of the generalization behavior of GCNs subjected to adversarial attacks remains elusive. To make progress on the mystery, we establish unified high-probability generalization bounds for GCNs in the context of node classification, by leveraging adversarial Transductive Rademacher Complexity (TRC) and developing a novel contraction technique on graph convolution. Our bounds capture the interaction between generalization error and adversarial perturbations, revealing the importance of key quantities in mitigating the negative effects of perturbations, such as low-dimensional feature projection, perturbation-dependent norm regularization, normalized graph matrix, proper number of network layers, etc. Furthermore, we provide TRC-based bounds of popular GCNs with r -normadditive perturbations for arbitrary r ≥ 1. A comparison of theoretical results demonstrates that specific network architectures (e.g., residual connection) can help alleviate the cumulative effect of perturbations during the forward propagation of deep GCNs. Experimental results on benchmark datasets validate our theoretical findings.