Graph-Enhanced Multi-Scale Contrastive Learning for Graph Anomaly Detection With Adaptive Diffusion Models

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 15 Jan 2026IEEE Trans. Big Data 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Graph anomaly detection has gained significant research interest across various domains. Due to the lack of labeled data, contrastive learning has been applied in detecting anomalies and various contrastive strategies have been initiated. However, these methods might force two instances (e.g., node-level and subgraph-level representations) with different category labels to be consistent during model training, which can adversely impact the model robustness. Also, they extract node-level representations only based on node attributes, which are inadequate in reflecting the information of the structural anomaly. To tackle this problem, we present a Graph-enhanced multi-scale Contrastive Learning framework for Anomaly Detection, GCLAD. In this framework, we design a diffusion probabilistic model-based graph enhancement module to adaptively manipulate neighbors to generate enhanced graphs, which can efficiently enhance subgraph-level representations and alleviate the inconsistent problem. Further, we present a multi-scale contrastive module where we introduce meta-paths to exploit a few relevant neighbors to boost node-level representations, and build the multi-scale contrastive losses to promote anomaly detection performance. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of GCLAD compared with state-of-the-art baselines.
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