On the Inference of Original Graph Information from Graph Embeddings

Abstract

Graph embedding converts a graph data into a low dimensional space to preserve the original graph information. However, graph data can be reconstructed by malicious adversaries to train machine learning models from graph embeddings. This paper studies to what extent an adversary (without the original graph data) can recover the original graph data from graph embeddings. To quantify the original graph information leakage from graph embeddings, we develop a deep neural network model InferNet that can be used by adversaries to infer the original graph information from an adversary-accessible graph embedding database. More specifically, we propose the data-free reversed knowledge distillation technique to support the InferNet training even if the original graph dataset is absent. To ensure the performance of InferNet, we design two cycle-consistency loss functions to have an interactive training of InferNet over three series of datasets. To further enhance the performance of InferNet, we provide a joint training algorithm that simultaneously trains the pseudo-sample generator and InferNet, which significantly reduces the storage space. We evaluate the performance of InferNet on three datasets, and the intensive experiments demonstrate that InferNet can infer the original graph information from the graph embedding dataset with high accuracy.