cs.LGJul 6, 2026

Active Learning on Adversarially Corrupted Graphs

Authors: Marco BressanNicolò Cesa-BianchiTommaso d`OrsiEmmanuel EspositoSilvio Lattanzi

Organizations: Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy · Bocconi University, Italy · Google Research

Abstract

Motivated by real-world scenarios where malicious entities tamper with existing networks, we define a model where an adversary seeks to hide a set of \emph{corrupted vertices} inside a graph GG^*. To this end, the adversary can add edges between the corrupted vertices, as well as edges between the corrupted vertices and GG^*, and its power is then measured by the size of the \emph{neighborhood} of the corrupted vertices in GG^*. Our goal is to design an active learning algorithm that efficiently finds the subset of corrupted vertices using a small number of label queries. We devise an efficient algorithm that approximately recovers the corrupted vertices with a query complexity that depends polynomially on both the power of the adversary and the \emph{vertex expansion} of GG^*, a fundamental measure of graph connectivity. At the heart of this result is a polynomial-time algorithm, obtained by carefully adapting sum-of-squares algorithms for approximating minimum expansion, that finds a set with small vertex expansion subject to cardinality constraints. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the vertex expansion is shown to play a key role in determining the query complexity of active learning algorithms robust to structural adversarial attacks.

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