A Survey of Generalization of Graph Anomaly Detection: From Transfer Learning to Foundation Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Pan, Junjun, Zheng, Yu, Tan, Yue, Liu, Yixin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Pan, Junjun
Zheng, Yu
Tan, Yue
Liu, Yixin
author_facet Pan, Junjun
Zheng, Yu
Tan, Yue
Liu, Yixin
contents Graph anomaly detection (GAD) has attracted increasing attention in recent years for identifying malicious samples in a wide range of graph-based applications, such as social media and e-commerce. However, most GAD methods assume identical training and testing distributions and are tailored to specific tasks, resulting in limited adaptability to real-world scenarios such as shifting data distributions and scarce training samples in new applications. To address the limitations, recent work has focused on improving the generalization capability of GAD models through transfer learning that leverages knowledge from related domains to enhance detection performance, or developing "one-for-all" GAD foundation models that generalize across multiple applications. Since a systematic understanding of generalization in GAD is still lacking, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of generalization in GAD. We first trace the evolution of generalization in GAD and formalize the problem settings, which further leads to our systematic taxonomy. Rooted in this fine-grained taxonomy, an up-to-date and comprehensive review is conducted for the existing generalized GAD methods. Finally, we identify current open challenges and suggest future directions to inspire future research in this emerging field.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_06609
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle A Survey of Generalization of Graph Anomaly Detection: From Transfer Learning to Foundation Models
Pan, Junjun
Zheng, Yu
Tan, Yue
Liu, Yixin
Machine Learning
Graph anomaly detection (GAD) has attracted increasing attention in recent years for identifying malicious samples in a wide range of graph-based applications, such as social media and e-commerce. However, most GAD methods assume identical training and testing distributions and are tailored to specific tasks, resulting in limited adaptability to real-world scenarios such as shifting data distributions and scarce training samples in new applications. To address the limitations, recent work has focused on improving the generalization capability of GAD models through transfer learning that leverages knowledge from related domains to enhance detection performance, or developing "one-for-all" GAD foundation models that generalize across multiple applications. Since a systematic understanding of generalization in GAD is still lacking, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of generalization in GAD. We first trace the evolution of generalization in GAD and formalize the problem settings, which further leads to our systematic taxonomy. Rooted in this fine-grained taxonomy, an up-to-date and comprehensive review is conducted for the existing generalized GAD methods. Finally, we identify current open challenges and suggest future directions to inspire future research in this emerging field.
title A Survey of Generalization of Graph Anomaly Detection: From Transfer Learning to Foundation Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06609