Potent but Stealthy: Rethink Profile Pollution Against Sequential Recommendation via Bi-Level Constrained Reinforcement Paradigm

Sequential Recommenders, which exploit dynamic user intents through interaction sequences, are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. While existing attacks primarily rely on data poisoning, they require large-scale user access or fake profiles thus lacking practicality. In this paper, we focus on the Profile Pollution Attack (PPA) that subtly contaminates partial user interactions to induce targeted mispredictions. Previous PPA methods suffer from two limitations, i.e., i) over-reliance on sequence horizon impact restricts fine-grained perturbations on item transitions, and ii) holistic modifications cause detectable distribution shifts. To address these challenges, we propose a constrained reinforcement driven attack CREAT that synergizes a bi-level optimization framework with multi-reward reinforcement learning to balance adversarial efficacy and stealthiness. We first develop a Pattern Balanced Rewarding Policy, which integrates pattern inversion rewards to invert critical patterns and distribution consistency rewards to minimize detectable shifts via unbalanced co-optimal transport. Then we employ a Constrained Group Relative Reinforcement Learning paradigm, enabling step-wise perturbations through dynamic barrier constraints and group-shared experience replay, achieving targeted pollution with minimal detectability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CREAT.

Authors

• Jiajie Su Zhejiang University
• Zihan Nan Peking University
• Yunshan Ma
• Xiaobo Xia School of Computing, National University of Singapore University of Science and Technology of China
• XiaoHua Feng
• Weiming Liu Zhejiang University
• Xiang Chen Zhejiang University
• Xiaolin Zheng Zhejiang University
• Chaochao Chen Zhejiang University

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