Learning graph embeddings is a crucial task in graph mining tasks. An effective graph embedding model can learn low-dimensional representations from graph-structured data for data publishing benefiting various downstream applications such as node classification, link prediction, etc. However, recent studies have revealed that graph embeddings are susceptible to attribute inference attacks, which allow attackers to infer private node attributes from the learned graph embeddings. To address these concerns, privacy-preserving graph embedding methods have emerged, aiming to simultaneously consider primary learning and privacy protection through adversarial learning. However, most existing methods assume that representation models have access to all sensitive attributes in advance during the training stage, which is not always the case due to diverse privacy preferences. Furthermore, the commonly used adversarial learning technique in privacy-preserving representation learning suffers from unstable training issues. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Private Variational Graph AutoEncoders (PVGAE) with the aid of independent distribution penalty as a regularization term. Specifically, we split the original variational graph autoencoder (VGAE) to learn sensitive and non-sensitive latent representations using two sets of encoders. Additionally, we introduce a novel regularization to enforce the independence of the encoders. We prove the theoretical effectiveness of regularization from the perspective of mutual information. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that PVGAE outperforms other baselines in private embedding learning regarding utility performance and privacy protection.

通过引入独立分布惩罚作为正则化项，我们提出了一种名为私有变分图自编码器（PVGAE）的新方法，特别地，我们通过使用两组编码器来学习敏感和非敏感潜在表示，同时引入了一种新的正则化方法来强制编码器的独立性，实验证明PVGAE在私有嵌入学习方面优于其他基线，并在效用性能和隐私保护方面取得了成功。

独立分布正则化用于私密图嵌入