Out-of-Distribution Generalized Graph Anomaly Detection with Homophily-aware Environment Mixup

Sibo Tian, Xin Wang, Zeyang Zhang, Haibo Chen, Wenwu Zhu

Keywords: Graph Anomaly Detection, Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Abstract: Graph anomaly detection (GAD) is widely prevalent in scenarios such as financial fraud detection, anti-money laundering, and social bot detection. However, structural distribution shifts are commonly observed in real-world GAD data due to selection bias, resulting in reduced homophily. Existing GAD methods tend to rely on homophilic shortcuts when trained on high-homophily structures, limiting their ability to generalize well to data with low homophily under structural distribution shifts. In this study, we propose to handle structural distribution shifts by generating novel environments characterized by diverse homophilic structures and utilizing invariant patterns, i.e., features and structures with the capability of stable prediction across structural distribution shifts, which face two challenges: (1) How to discover invariant patterns from entangled features and structures, as structures are sensitive to varying homophilic distributions. (2) How to systematically construct new environments with diverse homophilic structures. To address these challenges, we propose the Ego-Neighborhood Disentangled Encoder with Homophily-aware Environment Mixup (HEM), which effectively handles structural distribution shifts in GAD by discovering invariant patterns. Specifically, we first propose an ego-neighborhood disentangled encoder to decouple the learning of feature embeddings and structural embeddings, which facilitates subsequent improvements in the invariance of structural embeddings for prediction. Next, we introduce a homophily-aware environment mixup that dynamically adjusts edge weights through adversarial learning, effectively generating environments with diverse structural distributions. Finally, we iteratively train the classifier and environment mixup via adversarial training, simultaneously improving the diversity of constructed environments and discovering invariant patterns under structural distribution shifts. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance under structural distribution shift conditions.

Primary Area: Applications (e.g., vision, language, speech and audio, Creative AI)

Submission Number: 10530