English

Adversarial Edit Attacks for Tree Data

Machine Learning 2019-11-12 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

Many machine learning models can be attacked with adversarial examples, i.e. inputs close to correctly classified examples that are classified incorrectly. However, most research on adversarial attacks to date is limited to vectorial data, in particular image data. In this contribution, we extend the field by introducing adversarial edit attacks for tree-structured data with potential applications in medicine and automated program analysis. Our approach solely relies on the tree edit distance and a logarithmic number of black-box queries to the attacked classifier without any need for gradient information. We evaluate our approach on two programming and two biomedical data sets and show that many established tree classifiers, like tree-kernel-SVMs and recursive neural networks, can be attacked effectively.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.09364,
  title  = {Adversarial Edit Attacks for Tree Data},
  author = {Benjamin Paaßen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.09364},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

accepted at the 20th International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning (IDEAL)

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:56:17.422Z