Weiqiang Wang

Xiaolong Xu, Lingjuan Lyu, Yihong Dong et al. · pku

With the frequent happening of privacy leakage and the enactment of privacy laws across different countries, data owners are reluctant to directly share their raw data and labels with any other party. In reality, a lot of these raw data are stored in the graph database, especially for finance. For collaboratively building graph neural networks(GNNs), federated learning(FL) may not be an ideal choice for the vertically partitioned setting where privacy and efficiency are the main concerns. Moreover, almost all the existing federated GNNs are mainly designed for homogeneous graphs, which simplify various types of relations as the same type, thus largely limits their performance. We bridge this gap by proposing a split learning-based GNN(SplitGNN), where this model is divided into two sub-models: the local GNN model includes all the private data related computation to generate local node embeddings, whereas the global model calculates global embeddings by aggregating all the participants' local embeddings. Our SplitGNN allows the isolated heterogeneous neighborhood to be collaboratively utilized. To better capture representations, we propose a novel Heterogeneous Attention(HAT) algorithm and use both node-based and path-based attention mechanisms to learn various types of nodes and edges with multi-hop relation features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our SplitGNN on node classification tasks for two standard public datasets and the real-world dataset. Extensive experimental results validate that our proposed SplitGNN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art(SOTA) methods.

Yuke Hu, Wei Liang, Ruofan Wu et al.

Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) is a fundamental technique that extracts expressive representation from knowledge graph (KG) to facilitate diverse downstream tasks. The emerging federated KGE (FKGE) collaboratively trains from distributed KGs held among clients while avoiding exchanging clients' sensitive raw KGs, which can still suffer from privacy threats as evidenced in other federated model trainings (e.g., neural networks). However, quantifying and defending against such privacy threats remain unexplored for FKGE which possesses unique properties not shared by previously studied models. In this paper, we conduct the first holistic study of the privacy threat on FKGE from both attack and defense perspectives. For the attack, we quantify the privacy threat by proposing three new inference attacks, which reveal substantial privacy risk by successfully inferring the existence of the KG triple from victim clients. For the defense, we propose DP-Flames, a novel differentially private FKGE with private selection, which offers a better privacy-utility tradeoff by exploiting the entity-binding sparse gradient property of FKGE and comes with a tight privacy accountant by incorporating the state-of-the-art private selection technique. We further propose an adaptive privacy budget allocation policy to dynamically adjust defense magnitude across the training procedure. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that the proposed defense can successfully mitigate the privacy threat by effectively reducing the success rate of inference attacks from $83.1\%$ to $59.4\%$ on average with only a modest utility decrease.

Qiying Pan, Ruofan Wu, Tengfei Liu et al.

Federated training of Graph Neural Networks (GNN) has become popular in recent years due to its ability to perform graph-related tasks under data isolation scenarios while preserving data privacy. However, graph heterogeneity issues in federated GNN systems continue to pose challenges. Existing frameworks address the problem by representing local tasks using different statistics and relating them through a simple aggregation mechanism. However, these approaches suffer from limited efficiency from two aspects: low quality of task-relatedness quantification and inefficacy of exploiting the collaboration structure. To address these issues, we propose FedGKD, a novel federated GNN framework that utilizes a novel client-side graph dataset distillation method to extract task features that better describe task-relatedness, and introduces a novel server-side aggregation mechanism that is aware of the global collaboration structure. We conduct extensive experiments on six real-world datasets of different scales, demonstrating our framework's outperformance.

Ruofan Wu, Mingyang Zhang, Lingjuan Lyu et al.

The paradigm of vertical federated learning (VFL), where institutions collaboratively train machine learning models via combining each other's local feature or label information, has achieved great success in applications to financial risk management (FRM). The surging developments of graph representation learning (GRL) have opened up new opportunities for FRM applications under FL via efficiently utilizing the graph-structured data generated from underlying transaction networks. Meanwhile, transaction information is often considered highly sensitive. To prevent data leakage during training, it is critical to develop FL protocols with formal privacy guarantees. In this paper, we present an end-to-end GRL framework in the VFL setting called VESPER, which is built upon a general privatization scheme termed perturbed message passing (PMP) that allows the privatization of many popular graph neural architectures.Based on PMP, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of specific design choices of concrete graph neural architectures and provide solutions and improvements for both dense and sparse graphs. Extensive empirical evaluations over both public datasets and an industry dataset demonstrate that VESPER is capable of training high-performance GNN models over both sparse and dense graphs under reasonable privacy budgets.

Xi Chen, Yun Xiong, Siwei Zhang et al.

Discrete-Time Dynamic Graphs (DTDGs), which are prevalent in real-world implementations and notable for their ease of data acquisition, have garnered considerable attention from both academic researchers and industry practitioners. The representation learning of DTDGs has been extensively applied to model the dynamics of temporally changing entities and their evolving connections. Currently, DTDG representation learning predominantly relies on GNN+RNN architectures, which manifest the inherent limitations of both Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). GNNs suffer from the over-smoothing issue as the models architecture goes deeper, while RNNs struggle to capture long-term dependencies effectively. GNN+RNN architectures also grapple with scaling to large graph sizes and long sequences. Additionally, these methods often compute node representations separately and focus solely on individual node characteristics, thereby overlooking the behavior intersections between the two nodes whose link is being predicted, such as instances where the two nodes appear together in the same context or share common neighbors. This paper introduces a novel representation learning method DTFormer for DTDGs, pivoting from the traditional GNN+RNN framework to a Transformer-based architecture. Our approach exploits the attention mechanism to concurrently process topological information within the graph at each timestamp and temporal dynamics of graphs along the timestamps, circumventing the aforementioned fundamental weakness of both GNNs and RNNs. Moreover, we enhance the model's expressive capability by incorporating the intersection relationships among nodes and integrating a multi-patching module. Extensive experiments conducted on six public dynamic graph benchmark datasets confirm our model's efficacy, achieving the SOTA performance.

Sheng Tian, Xintan Zeng, Yifei Hu et al.

Graph-based patterns are extensively employed and favored by practitioners within industrial companies due to their capacity to represent the behavioral attributes and topological relationships among users, thereby offering enhanced interpretability in comparison to black-box models commonly utilized for classification and recognition tasks. For instance, within the scenario of transaction risk management, a graph pattern that is characteristic of a particular risk category can be readily employed to discern transactions fraught with risk, delineate networks of criminal activity, or investigate the methodologies employed by fraudsters. Nonetheless, graph data in industrial settings is often characterized by its massive scale, encompassing data sets with millions or even billions of nodes, making the manual extraction of graph patterns not only labor-intensive but also necessitating specialized knowledge in particular domains of risk. Moreover, existing methodologies for mining graph patterns encounter significant obstacles when tasked with analyzing large-scale attributed graphs. In this work, we introduce GraphRPM, an industry-purpose parallel and distributed risk pattern mining framework on large attributed graphs. The framework incorporates a novel edge-involved graph isomorphism network alongside optimized operations for parallel graph computation, which collectively contribute to a considerable reduction in computational complexity and resource expenditure. Moreover, the intelligent filtration of efficacious risky graph patterns is facilitated by the proposed evaluation metrics. Comprehensive experimental evaluations conducted on real-world datasets of varying sizes substantiate the capability of GraphRPM to adeptly address the challenges inherent in mining patterns from large-scale industrial attributed graphs, thereby underscoring its substantial value for industrial deployment.

Xiang Ni, Xiaolong Xu, Lingjuan Lyu et al.

Recently, Graph Neural Network (GNN) has achieved remarkable success in various real-world problems on graph data. However in most industries, data exists in the form of isolated islands and the data privacy and security is also an important issue. In this paper, we propose FedVGCN, a federated GCN learning paradigm for privacy-preserving node classification task under data vertically partitioned setting, which can be generalized to existing GCN models. Specifically, we split the computation graph data into two parts. For each iteration of the training process, the two parties transfer intermediate results to each other under homomorphic encryption. We conduct experiments on benchmark data and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of FedVGCN in the case of GraphSage.