Recent years have witnessed the emergence and development of graph neural
networks (GNNs), which have been shown as a powerful approach for graph
representation learning in many tasks, such as node classification and graph
classification. The research on the robustness of these models has also started
to attract attentions in the machine learning field. However, most of the
existing work in this area focus on the GNNs for node-level tasks, while little
work has been done to study the robustness of the GNNs for the graph
classification task. In this paper, we aim to explore the vulnerability of the
Hierarchical Graph Pooling (HGP) Neural Networks, which are advanced GNNs that
perform very well in the graph classification in terms of prediction accuracy.
We propose an adversarial attack framework for this task. Specifically, we
design a surrogate model that consists of convolutional and pooling operators
to generate adversarial samples to fool the hierarchical GNN-based graph
classification models. We set the preserved nodes by the pooling operator as
our attack targets, and then we perturb the attack targets slightly to fool the
pooling operator in hierarchical GNNs so that they will select the wrong nodes
to preserve. We show the adversarial samples generated from multiple datasets
by our surrogate model have enough transferability to attack current
state-of-art graph classification models. Furthermore, we conduct the robust
train on the target models and demonstrate that the retrained graph
classification models are able to better defend against the attack from the
adversarial samples. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on
the adversarial attack against hierarchical GNN-based graph classification
models.