Identity-Preserving Adversarial Training for Robust Network Embedding

Network embedding, as an approach to learning low-dimensional representations of nodes, has been proved extremely useful in many applications, e.g., node classification and link prediction. Unfortunately, existing network embedding models are vulnerable to random or adversarial perturbations, which may degrade the performance of network embedding when being applied to downstream tasks. To achieve robust network embedding, researchers introduce adversarial training to regularize the embedding learning process by training on a mixture of adversarial examples and original examples. However, existing methods generate adversarial examples heuristically, failing to guarantee the imperceptibility of generated adversarial examples, and thus limit the power of adversarial training. In this paper, we propose a novel method Identity-Preserving Adversarial Training (IPAT) for network embedding, which generates imperceptible adversarial examples with explicit identity-preserving regularization. We formalize such identity-preserving regularization as a multi-class classification problem where each node represents a class, and we encourage each adversarial example to be discriminated as the class of its original node. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed IPAT method significantly improves the robustness of network embedding models and the generalization of the learned node representations on various downstream tasks.