4 ms·
I think it's pretty easy to construct adversarial examples to your (1) that are dealt with cleanly by real pagerank. e.g. if A is a Huge Important website, and
by hhmc 4y ago
I think it's pretty easy to construct adversarial examples to your (1) that are dealt with cleanly by real pagerank.
e.g. if A is a Huge Important website, and A -> B -> C, then locally looking at {B, C} will underweight C significantly. (And, sure, you might say to look at k-th order inbound links for your iterative approach, but the adversary can just move the weight to k+1).
Perhaps, as you claim, your approach would have been good enough, but clearly understanding the theory got them something better.
- zamfi 4y agoThis argument that it’s pretty easy to construct adversarial examples would be much more convincing if…it were not what PageRank actually is. PageRank itself initially ran iteratively and would have had exactly this same problem. In any case, I’m not sure your example is actually adversarial, as there’s not an action that an adversary could take implied by it? Maybe you meant “poorly handled case”? But yes, run it iteratively. 10 steps? 20? Until convergence for some epsilon? Nothing against theory, but I think they did fine without it.
- hhmc 4y ago> Maybe you meant “poorly handled case”? No, I meant adversarial. It's standard languge (jargon if you wish) from mathematical proofs.
- zamfi 4y agoHuh, interesting. In the ML and CS theory literature I’ve only ever seen “adversarial example” used to mean an input explicitly designed to produce a specific unexpected output, not just a worst-case output that isn’t what you want. Do you have an example use of this sense that I could look at to update myself?