Target-Aware Interaction-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Black-Box Node Injection Attacks on Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable performance in graph representation learning, yet their inherent vulnerability to adversarial attacks poses severe security risks. Especially, black-box node injection attacks have become a major threat to GNNs since they inject malicious nodes without altering the original graph topology. However, they typically decouple the generation of malicious node features and edge connections, thereby resulting in suboptimal attack efficacy under stringent budgets. To address this critical issue, this study proposes a novel Target-aware Interaction-guided Reinforcement learning for Black-box node injection Attacks on GNNs (TIRBA), which formulates the attack as a Markov Decision Process and jointly optimizes node feature generation and edge construction in a heterogeneous action space. Firstly, TIRBA designs a target-aware interaction encoder to fuse information of node features and edges. Further, it introduces a class-center guidance mechanism to utilize prior class distribution information, thereby guiding efficient exploration of the high-dimensional feature space. Finally, a topology difference-aware state value evaluation is adopted to explicitly capture local structural anomalies caused by injected nodes, thereby stabilizing the reinforcement learning training process. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed TIRBA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art black-box node injection attack methods.