Exploiting Pre-Trained Language Models for Black-Box Attack against Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Despite the emerging research on adversarial attacks against knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models, most of them focus on white-box attack settings. However, white-box attacks are difficult to apply in practice compared to black-box attacks since they require access to model parameters that are unlikely to be provided. In this article, we propose a novel black-box attack method that only requires access to knowledge graph data, making it more realistic in real-world attack scenarios. Specifically, we utilize pre-trained language models (PLMs) to encode text features of the knowledge graphs, an aspect neglected by previous research. We then employ these encoded text features to identify the most influential triples for constructing corrupted triples for the attack. To improve the transferability of the attack, we further propose to fine-tune the PLM model by enriching triple embeddings with structure information. Extensive experiments conducted on two knowledge graph datasets illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.