GUARD: Graph Universal Adversarial Defense

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have shown to be vulnerable to small adversarial perturbations, which becomes a severe threat and largely limits their applications in security-critical scenarios. To mitigate such a threat, considerable research efforts have been devoted to increasing the robustness of GCNs against adversarial attacks. However, current approaches for defense are typically designed for the whole graph and consider the global performance, posing challenges in protecting important local nodes from stronger adversarial targeted attacks. In this work, we present a simple yet effective method, named Graph Universal Adversarial Defense (GUARD). Unlike previous works, GUARD protects each individual node from attacks with a universal defensive patch, which is generated once and can be applied to any node (node-agnostic) in a graph. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves robustness for several established GCNs against multiple adversarial attacks and outperforms state-of-the-art defense methods by large margins. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/EdisonLeeeee/GUARD.