Revisiting Graph Contrastive Learning on Anomaly Detection: A Structural Imbalance Perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Xu, Yiming, Peng, Zhen, Shi, Bin, Hua, Xu, Dong, Bo, Wang, Song, Chen, Chen
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Xu, Yiming
Peng, Zhen
Shi, Bin
Hua, Xu
Dong, Bo
Wang, Song
Chen, Chen
author_facet Xu, Yiming
Peng, Zhen
Shi, Bin
Hua, Xu
Dong, Bo
Wang, Song
Chen, Chen
contents The superiority of graph contrastive learning (GCL) has prompted its application to anomaly detection tasks for more powerful risk warning systems. Unfortunately, existing GCL-based models tend to excessively prioritize overall detection performance while neglecting robustness to structural imbalance, which can be problematic for many real-world networks following power-law degree distributions. Particularly, GCL-based methods may fail to capture tail anomalies (abnormal nodes with low degrees). This raises concerns about the security and robustness of current anomaly detection algorithms and therefore hinders their applicability in a variety of realistic high-risk scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, research on the robustness of graph anomaly detection to structural imbalance has received little scrutiny. To address the above issues, this paper presents a novel GCL-based framework named AD-GCL. It devises the neighbor pruning strategy to filter noisy edges for head nodes and facilitate the detection of genuine tail nodes by aligning from head nodes to forged tail nodes. Moreover, AD-GCL actively explores potential neighbors to enlarge the receptive field of tail nodes through anomaly-guided neighbor completion. We further introduce intra- and inter-view consistency loss of the original and augmentation graph for enhanced representation. The performance evaluation of the whole, head, and tail nodes on multiple datasets validates the comprehensive superiority of the proposed AD-GCL in detecting both head anomalies and tail anomalies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_14677
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Graph Contrastive Learning on Anomaly Detection: A Structural Imbalance Perspective
Xu, Yiming
Peng, Zhen
Shi, Bin
Hua, Xu
Dong, Bo
Wang, Song
Chen, Chen
Machine Learning
The superiority of graph contrastive learning (GCL) has prompted its application to anomaly detection tasks for more powerful risk warning systems. Unfortunately, existing GCL-based models tend to excessively prioritize overall detection performance while neglecting robustness to structural imbalance, which can be problematic for many real-world networks following power-law degree distributions. Particularly, GCL-based methods may fail to capture tail anomalies (abnormal nodes with low degrees). This raises concerns about the security and robustness of current anomaly detection algorithms and therefore hinders their applicability in a variety of realistic high-risk scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, research on the robustness of graph anomaly detection to structural imbalance has received little scrutiny. To address the above issues, this paper presents a novel GCL-based framework named AD-GCL. It devises the neighbor pruning strategy to filter noisy edges for head nodes and facilitate the detection of genuine tail nodes by aligning from head nodes to forged tail nodes. Moreover, AD-GCL actively explores potential neighbors to enlarge the receptive field of tail nodes through anomaly-guided neighbor completion. We further introduce intra- and inter-view consistency loss of the original and augmentation graph for enhanced representation. The performance evaluation of the whole, head, and tail nodes on multiple datasets validates the comprehensive superiority of the proposed AD-GCL in detecting both head anomalies and tail anomalies.
title Revisiting Graph Contrastive Learning on Anomaly Detection: A Structural Imbalance Perspective
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14677