
3 Completion Robustness and
Interpretability via Adversarial Graph
Edits (CRIAGE)
For adversarial modifications on KGs, we first de-
fine the space of possible modifications. For a tar-
get triple
hs, r, oi
, we constrain the possible triples
that we can remove (or inject) to be in the form
of
hs
0
, r
0
, oi
i.e
s
0
and
r
0
may be different from the
target, but the object is not. We analyze other forms
of modifications such as
hs, r
0
, o
0
i
and
hs, r
0
, oi
in
appendices A.1 and A.2, and leave empirical evalu-
ation of these modifications for future work.
3.1 Removing a fact (CRIAGE-Remove)
For explaining a target prediction, we are inter-
ested in identifying the observed fact that has the
most influence (according to the model) on the pre-
diction. We define influence of an observed fact
on the prediction as the change in the prediction
score if the observed fact was not present when
the embeddings were learned. Previous work have
used this concept of influence similarly for sev-
eral different tasks [Kononenko et al., 2010, Koh
and Liang, 2017]. Formally, for the target triple
hs, r, oi
and observed graph
G
, we want to identify
a neighboring triple
hs
0
, r
0
, oi ∈ G
such that the
score
ψ
(
s, r, o
) when trained on
G
and the score
ψ
(
s, r, o
) when trained on
G−{hs
0
, r
0
, oi}
are max-
imally different, i.e.
argmax
(s
0
,r
0
)∈Nei(o)
∆
(s
0
,r
0
)
(s, r, o) (2)
where ∆
(s
0
,r
0
)
(
s, r, o
) =
ψ
(
s, r, o
)
−ψ
(
s, r, o
), and
Nei(o) = {(s
0
, r
0
)|hs
0
, r
0
, oi ∈ G}.
3.2 Adding a new fact (CRIAGE-Add)
We are also interested in investigating the robust-
ness of models, i.e., how sensitive are the predic-
tions to small additions to the knowledge graph.
Specifically, for a target prediction
hs, r, oi
, we
are interested in identifying a single fake fact
hs
0
, r
0
, oi
that, when added to the knowledge graph
G
, changes the prediction score
ψ
(
s, r, o
) the most.
Using
ψ
(
s, r, o
) as the score after training on
G ∪ {hs
0
, r
0
, oi}, we define the adversary as:
argmax
(s
0
,r
0
)
∆
(s
0
,r
0
)
(s, r, o) (3)
where ∆
(s
0
,r
0
)
(
s, r, o
) =
ψ
(
s, r, o
)
− ψ
(
s, r, o
).
The search here is over any possible
s
0
∈ ξ
, which
is often in the millions for most real-world KGs,
and
r
0
∈ R
. We also identify adversaries that
increase the prediction score for specific false
triple, i.e., for a target fake fact
hs, r, oi
, the ad-
versary is
argmax
(s
0
,r
0
)
−
∆
(s
0
,r
0
)
(
s, r, o
), where
∆
(s
0
,r
0
)
(s, r, o) is defined as before.
3.3 Challenges
There are a number of crucial challenges when con-
ducting such adversarial attack on KGs. First, eval-
uating the effect of changing the KG on the score
of the target fact (
ψ
(
s, r, o
)) is expensive since we
need to update the embeddings by retraining the
model on the new graph; a very time-consuming
process that is at least linear in the size of
G
. Sec-
ond, since there are many candidate facts that can
be added to the knowledge graph, identifying the
most promising adversary through search-based
methods is also expensive. Specifically, the search
size for unobserved facts is
|ξ| ×|R|
, which, for ex-
ample in YAGO3-10 KG, can be as many as 4
.
5
M
possible facts for a single target prediction.
4 Efficiently Identifying the Modification
In this section, we propose algorithms to address
mentioned challenges by (1) approximating the ef-
fect of changing the graph on a target prediction,
and (2) using continuous optimization for the dis-
crete search over potential modifications.
4.1 First-order Approximation of Influence
We first study the addition of a fact to the graph,
and then extend it to cover removal as well.
To capture the effect of an adversarial modifi-
cation on the score of a target triple, we need
to study the effect of the change on the vector
representations of the target triple. We use
e
s
,
e
r
, and
e
o
to denote the embeddings of
s, r, o
at the solution of
argmin L
(
G
), and when con-
sidering the adversarial triple
hs
0
, r
0
, oi
, we use
e
s
,
e
r
, and
e
o
for the new embeddings of
s, r, o
,
respectively. Thus
e
s
, e
r
, e
o
is a solution to
argmin L
(
G ∪ {hs
0
, r
0
, oi}
), which can also be
written as
argmin L
(
G
) +
L
(
hs
0
, r
0
, oi
). Similarly,
f(e
s
, e
r
) changes to f(e
s
, e
r
) after retraining.
Since we only consider adversaries in the form
of
hs
0
, r
0
, oi
, we only consider the effect of the at-
tack on
e
o
and neglect its effect on
e
s
and
e
r
. This
assumption is reasonable since the adversary is con-
nected with
o
and directly affects its embedding
when added, but it will only have a secondary, neg-
ligible effect on
e
s
and
e
r
, in comparison to its