GAD in the Wild: Benchmarking Graph Anomaly Detection under Realistic Deployment Challenges

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhou, Jingjing, Huang, Shiyu, Qing, Qing, Yuan, Zuquan, Huang, Huafei, Xu, Ziqi, Hou, Mingliang, Zhang, Xikun, Luo, Renqiang, Lee, Ivan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Zhou, Jingjing
Huang, Shiyu
Qing, Qing
Yuan, Zuquan
Huang, Huafei
Xu, Ziqi
Hou, Mingliang
Zhang, Xikun
Luo, Renqiang
Lee, Ivan
author_facet Zhou, Jingjing
Huang, Shiyu
Qing, Qing
Yuan, Zuquan
Huang, Huafei
Xu, Ziqi
Hou, Mingliang
Zhang, Xikun
Luo, Renqiang
Lee, Ivan
contents Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) is a critical task in graph machine learning with vital applications in financial fraud detection and social platform governance. However, existing GAD benchmarks are often restricted to small-scale, curated graphs with relatively balanced anomaly ratios, leaving a substantial gap between academic evaluation and real-world deployment. To bridge this gap, we present a multi-dimensional benchmark that systematically evaluates GAD models under three deployment-relevant challenges: million-scale graphs, extreme anomaly scarcity, and missing node attributes. We derive a family of controlled benchmark variants from five diverse graphs, including two native industrial-scale datasets with over 3.7 million nodes. Our extensive evaluation of nine representative GAD models reveals three major limitations: (1) most GNN-based methods fail to scale to million-node graphs due to prohibitive memory requirements; (2) detection performance drops sharply under realistic anomaly ratios (e.g., 0.1\%), often resulting in zero recall; and (3) reconstruction-based models are highly sensitive to attribute imputation strategies. Our findings suggest that strong performance in laboratory settings does not guarantee robustness in production environments. We release this benchmark and empirical evaluation as a diagnostic testbed to promote the development of robust and scalable GAD systems for large-scale, imperfect graphs encountered in practice. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Benchmark_GAD-E7A3.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_07133
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GAD in the Wild: Benchmarking Graph Anomaly Detection under Realistic Deployment Challenges
Zhou, Jingjing
Huang, Shiyu
Qing, Qing
Yuan, Zuquan
Huang, Huafei
Xu, Ziqi
Hou, Mingliang
Zhang, Xikun
Luo, Renqiang
Lee, Ivan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) is a critical task in graph machine learning with vital applications in financial fraud detection and social platform governance. However, existing GAD benchmarks are often restricted to small-scale, curated graphs with relatively balanced anomaly ratios, leaving a substantial gap between academic evaluation and real-world deployment. To bridge this gap, we present a multi-dimensional benchmark that systematically evaluates GAD models under three deployment-relevant challenges: million-scale graphs, extreme anomaly scarcity, and missing node attributes. We derive a family of controlled benchmark variants from five diverse graphs, including two native industrial-scale datasets with over 3.7 million nodes. Our extensive evaluation of nine representative GAD models reveals three major limitations: (1) most GNN-based methods fail to scale to million-node graphs due to prohibitive memory requirements; (2) detection performance drops sharply under realistic anomaly ratios (e.g., 0.1\%), often resulting in zero recall; and (3) reconstruction-based models are highly sensitive to attribute imputation strategies. Our findings suggest that strong performance in laboratory settings does not guarantee robustness in production environments. We release this benchmark and empirical evaluation as a diagnostic testbed to promote the development of robust and scalable GAD systems for large-scale, imperfect graphs encountered in practice. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Benchmark_GAD-E7A3.
title GAD in the Wild: Benchmarking Graph Anomaly Detection under Realistic Deployment Challenges
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07133