# SFR-GNN: Simple and Fast Robust GNNs against Structural Attacks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.16537 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16537/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Attacks on Neural Networks for Graph Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07984/) (2018)
- [Graph Structure Learning for Robust Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10203/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Attacks on Graph Neural Networks via Meta Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08412/) (2019)
- [Topology Attack and Defense for Graph Neural Networks: An Optimization Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04214/) (2019)
- [Node Similarity Preserving Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09643/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Attacks on Node Embeddings via Graph Poisoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01093/) (2018)
- [Robustness of Graph Neural Networks at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14038/) (2021)
- [Scalable Graph Neural Networks via Bidirectional Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15421/) (2020)
- [DeepRobust: A PyTorch Library for Adversarial Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06149/) (2020)
- [Bag of Tricks for Node Classification with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13355/) (2021)
- [Bag of Tricks for Training Deeper Graph Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Benchmark Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10521/) (2021)
- [Reliable Representations Make A Stronger Defender: Unsupervised Structure Refinement for Robust GNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00012/) (2022)
- [Towards Reasonable Budget Allocation in Untargeted Graph Structure Attacks via Gradient Debias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00010/) (2023)
- [MuSe-GNN: Learning Unified Gene Representation From Multimodal Biological Graph Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02275/) (2023)
- [Cost Sensitive GNN-based Imbalanced Learning for Mobile Social Network Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17486/) (2023)
- [Structack: Structure-based Adversarial Attacks on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11327/) (2021)
- [FocusedCleaner: Sanitizing Poisoned Graphs for Robust GNN-based Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13815/) (2022)
- [Towards Adversarially Robust Recommendation from Adaptive Fraudster Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11534/) (2022)
- [Black-Box Attacks against Signed Graph Analysis via Balance Poisoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02396/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated commendable performance for graph-structured data. Yet, GNNs are often vulnerable to adversarial structural attacks as embedding generation relies on graph topology. Existing efforts are dedicated to purifying the maliciously modified structure or applying adaptive aggregation, thereby enhancing the robustness against adversarial structural attacks. It is inevitable for a defender to consume heavy computational costs due to lacking prior knowledge about modified structures. To this end, we propose an efficient defense method, called Simple and Fast Robust Graph Neural Network (SFR-GNN), supported by mutual information theory. The SFR-GNN first pre-trains a GNN model using node attributes and then fine-tunes it over the modified graph in the manner of contrastive learning, which is free of purifying modified structures and adaptive aggregation, thus achieving great efficiency gains. Consequently, SFR-GNN exhibits a 24%--162% speedup compared to advanced robust models, demonstrating superior robustness for node classification tasks.