{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/dual-space-attacks-against-random-walk-based","title":"Coupled-Space Attacks against Random-Walk-based Anomaly Detection","arxiv_id":"2307.14387","date":"2023-07-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yuni Lai","Marcin Waniek","Liying Li","Jingwen Wu","Yulin Zhu","Tomasz P. Michalak","Talal Rahwan","Kai Zhou"],"abstract":"Random Walks-based Anomaly Detection (RWAD) is commonly used to identify anomalous patterns in various applications. An intriguing characteristic of RWAD is that the input graph can either be pre-existing or constructed from raw features. Consequently, there are two potential attack surfaces against RWAD: graph-space attacks and feature-space attacks. In this paper, we explore this vulnerability by designing practical coupled-space attacks, investigating the interplay between graph-space and feature-space attacks. To this end, we conduct a thorough complexity analysis, proving that attacking RWAD is NP-hard. Then, we proceed to formulate the graph-space attack as a bi-level optimization problem and propose two strategies to solve it: alternative iteration (alterI-attack) or utilizing the closed-form solution of the random walk model (cf-attack). Finally, we utilize the results from the graph-space attacks as guidance to design more powerful feature-space attacks (i.e., graph-guided attacks). Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed attacks are effective in enabling the target nodes from RWAD with a limited attack budget. In addition, we conduct transfer attack experiments in a black-box setting, which show that our feature attack significantly decreases the anomaly scores of target nodes. Our study opens the door to studying the coupled-space attack against graph anomaly detection in which the graph space relies on the feature space.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.14387v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.14387v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"dual-space-attacks-against-random-walk-based","repo_url":"https://github.com/yuni-lai/coupledattackrw","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"dual-space-attacks-against-random-walk-based","repo_url":"https://github.com/yuni-lai/dualattackrw","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"anomaly-detection","task_name":"Anomaly Detection"},{"task_slug":"graph-anomaly-detection","task_name":"Graph Anomaly Detection"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}