Guarding Graph Neural Networks for Unsupervised Graph Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised graph anomaly detection aims at identifying rare patterns that deviate from the majority in a graph without the aid of labels, which is important for a variety of real-world applications. Recent advances have utilized graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn effective node representations by aggregating information from neighborhoods. This is motivated by the hypothesis that nodes in the graph tend to exhibit consistent behaviors with their neighborhoods. However, such consistency can be disrupted by graph anomalies in multiple ways. Most existing methods directly employ GNNs to learn representations, disregarding the negative impact of graph anomalies on GNNs, resulting in suboptimal node representations and anomaly detection performance. While a few recent approaches have redesigned GNNs for graph anomaly detection under semi-supervised label guidance, how to address the adverse effects of graph anomalies on GNNs in unsupervised scenarios and learn effective representations for anomaly detection are still underexplored. To bridge this gap, in this article, we propose a simple, yet effective framework for guarding GNNs for unsupervised graph anomaly detection (G3AD). Specifically, G3AD first introduces two auxiliary networks along with correlation constraints to guard the GNNs against inconsistent information encoding. Furthermore, G3AD introduces an adaptive caching (AC) module to guard the GNNs from directly reconstructing the observed graph data that contains anomalies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our G3AD can outperform 20 state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world graph anomaly datasets, with flexible generalization ability in different GNN backbones.