Unsupervised Heterogeneous Graph Rewriting Attack via Node Clustering

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has become one of the most popular learning paradigms and has achieved remarkable success in the graph field. Recently, a series of pre-training studies on heterogeneous graphs (HGs) using SSL have been proposed considering the heterogeneity of real-world graph data. However, verification of the robustness of heterogeneous graph pre-training is still a research gap. Most existing researches focus on supervised attacks on graphs, which are limited to a specific scenario and will not work when labels are not available. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised heterogeneous graph rewriting attack via node clustering (HGAC) that can effectively attack HG pre-training models without using labels. Specifically, a heterogeneous edge rewriting strategy is designed to ensure the rationality and concealment of the attacks. Then, a tailored heterogeneous graph contrastive learning (HGCL) is used as a surrogate model. Moreover, we leverage node clustering results of the clean HGs as the pseudo-labels to guide the optimization of structural attacks. Extensive experiments exhibit powerful attack performances of our HGAC on various downstream tasks (i.e., node classification, node clustering, metapath prediction, and visualization) under poisoning attack and evasion attack.