Title: Adversarial Robustness of Machine Learning Models for Graphs

Abstract — Graph neural networks and node embedding techniques have recently achieved impressive results in many graph learning tasks. Despite their proliferation, studies of their robustness properties are still very limited -- yet, in domains where graph learning methods are often used, e.g. the web, adversaries are common. In my talk, I will shed light on the aspect of adversarial robustness for state-of-the art graph-based learning techniques. I will highlight the unique challenges and opportunities that come along with the graph setting and introduce different perturbation approaches showcasing the methods vulnerabilities. I will conclude with a short discussion of methods improving robustness.

Biography — Stephan Günnemann is a Professor at the Department of Informatics, Technical University of Munich. He acquired his doctoral degree in 2012 at RWTH Aachen University, Germany in the field of computer science. From 2012 to 2015 he was an associate of Carnegie Mellon University, USA; initially as a postdoctoral fellow and later as a senior researcher. Stephan Günnemann has been a visiting researcher at Simon Fraser University, Canada, and a research scientist at the Research & Technology Center of Siemens AG. His main research interests include the development of robust and scalable machine learning techniques for graphs and temporal data. His works on subspace clustering on graphs as well as his analysis of adversarial robustness of graph neural networks have received the best research paper awards at ECML-PKDD 2011 and KDD 2018.