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Main Authors: Liu, Yilin, Zhang, Hongchao, Johnson, Taylor T., Taha, Ahmad F., Ma, Meiyi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00304
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author Liu, Yilin
Zhang, Hongchao
Johnson, Taylor T.
Taha, Ahmad F.
Ma, Meiyi
author_facet Liu, Yilin
Zhang, Hongchao
Johnson, Taylor T.
Taha, Ahmad F.
Ma, Meiyi
contents Graph anomaly detection methods aim to distinguish anomalous nodes. While prior methods characterize anomalies through increased variation in the spectral energy distributions, they overlook those that result in decreased variation, i.e., camouflaged anomalies that appear normal. We show that this type of anomaly persists across multiple datasets and remains undetectable by existing spectral approaches. To address this limitation, we propose a node-level spectral energy formulation that is fully compatible with message passing and enables the detection of camouflaged anomalies. Building on this formulation, we introduce an energy-aware graph learning framework that models spectral shifts through energy-driven message passing in both static and time-series graphs. Besides, our unified architecture extends to temporal settings without introducing specialized sequence modules, enabling efficient learning under long sliding windows. Extensive experiments on large-scale benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_00304
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modeling Spectral Energy Shifts in Spatio-Temporal Graph Anomaly Detection
Liu, Yilin
Zhang, Hongchao
Johnson, Taylor T.
Taha, Ahmad F.
Ma, Meiyi
Machine Learning
Graph anomaly detection methods aim to distinguish anomalous nodes. While prior methods characterize anomalies through increased variation in the spectral energy distributions, they overlook those that result in decreased variation, i.e., camouflaged anomalies that appear normal. We show that this type of anomaly persists across multiple datasets and remains undetectable by existing spectral approaches. To address this limitation, we propose a node-level spectral energy formulation that is fully compatible with message passing and enables the detection of camouflaged anomalies. Building on this formulation, we introduce an energy-aware graph learning framework that models spectral shifts through energy-driven message passing in both static and time-series graphs. Besides, our unified architecture extends to temporal settings without introducing specialized sequence modules, enabling efficient learning under long sliding windows. Extensive experiments on large-scale benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our approach.
title Modeling Spectral Energy Shifts in Spatio-Temporal Graph Anomaly Detection
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00304