Online Fraud Detection via Test-Time Retrieval-Based Representation Enrichment

Yiran Qiao, Ningtao Wang, Yuncong Gao, Yang Yang, Xing Fu, Weiqiang Wang, Xiang Ao

Abstract: Anti-fraud machine learning systems are perpetually confronted with the significant challenge of concept drift, driven by the continuous and intense evolution of fraudulent techniques. That is, outdated models trained on historical fraudulent behaviors often fall short in addressing the evolving tactics of malicious users over time. The key issue lies in effectively tackling the rapid and significant evolution of fraudsters' behaviors to detect these emerging and unforeseen anomalies. In this paper, we propose a solution by directly accessing real-time data and introducing a lightweight plug-in approach named TRE (Test-time Retrieval-based Representation Enrichment). Considering the similarity among samples, TRE employs a retriever to efficiently identify the top-K most relevant recent samples and implements an aggregation strategy to provide neighboring embeddings to the predictor. It thus adjusts the trained classifiers during the test time, providing them with the information from the latest unlabeled data. Extensive experiments on three large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of TRE. By consistently incorporating information from the nearest neighbors, TRE demonstrates high adaptability and surpasses existing methods in performance.