论文标题
网络中意见动态的对抗性扰动
Adversarial Perturbations of Opinion Dynamics in Networks
论文作者
论文摘要
我们研究网络结构,意见动力学和对手人为地引起分歧的力量之间的联系。我们通过扩展社会科学中的舆论形成模型来解决这些问题,以代表最近事件中熟悉的场景,在这些情况下,外部演员试图通过虚假的新闻和机器人通过复杂的信息战策略来破坏社区的稳定。在许多情况下,这些努力的内在目标不一定是改变网络的整体情感,而是引起不和谐。这些扰动通过在基础网络上的意见动力学扩散,通过计算机科学和社会科学的工作进行了分析和抽象的机制。我们研究了此类攻击的属性,考虑了寻求创建分歧的对手以及为捍卫网络免于攻击的实体而设计的最佳策略。我们表明,对于这些类型的目标的不同表述,网络光谱结构的不同制度将限制对手的播种能力;这使我们能够定性地描述哪些网络对这些扰动最容易受到影响。然后,我们考虑网络辩护人的算法任务,以通过异质绝缘淋巴结来减轻这些对抗性攻击。我们表明,通过考虑此问题的几何形状,可以通过凸编程有效地解决此优化任务。最后,我们概括了这些结果,以允许两个网络结构,其中意见动力学过程和分歧的衡量结果变得未耦合,并确定对手的力量如何变化;例如,当通过社交媒体控制观点动态时,这可能会产生,而在“现实世界”的连接沿着分歧时,这可能会产生。
We study the connections between network structure, opinion dynamics, and an adversary's power to artificially induce disagreements. We approach these questions by extending models of opinion formation in the social sciences to represent scenarios, familiar from recent events, in which external actors seek to destabilize communities through sophisticated information warfare tactics via fake news and bots. In many instances, the intrinsic goals of these efforts are not necessarily to shift the overall sentiment of the network, but rather to induce discord. These perturbations diffuse via opinion dynamics on the underlying network, through mechanisms that have been analyzed and abstracted through work in computer science and the social sciences. We investigate the properties of such attacks, considering optimal strategies both for the adversary seeking to create disagreement and for the entities tasked with defending the network from attack. We show that for different formulations of these types of objectives, different regimes of the spectral structure of the network will limit the adversary's capacity to sow discord; this enables us to qualitatively describe which networks are most vulnerable against these perturbations. We then consider the algorithmic task of a network defender to mitigate these sorts of adversarial attacks by insulating nodes heterogeneously; we show that, by considering the geometry of this problem, this optimization task can be efficiently solved via convex programming. Finally, we generalize these results to allow for two network structures, where the opinion dynamics process and the measurement of disagreement become uncoupled, and determine how the adversary's power changes; for instance, this may arise when opinion dynamics are controlled an online community via social media, while disagreement is measured along "real-world" connections.