# Anomaly Detection on Attributed Networks via Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.00113 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00113/

## Key facts

- Cited by 177 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01973/) (2018)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning with Differentiable Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08804/) (2018)
- [Graph Neural Networks for Social Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07243/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [GraphSAINT: Graph Sampling Based Inductive Learning Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04931/) (2019)
- [Connecting the Dots: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11650/) (2020)
- [Cluster-GCN: An Efficient Algorithm for Training Deep and Large Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07953/) (2019)
- [GCC: Graph Contrastive Coding for Graph Neural Network Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09963/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 177)

- [FedProto: Federated Prototype Learning across Heterogeneous Clients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00243/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Anomaly Detection with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07178/) (2021)
- [Graph Neural Networks for Graphs with Heterophily: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07082/) (2022)
- [Federated Learning from Pre-Trained Models: A Contrastive Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10083/) (2022)
- [BOND: Benchmarking Unsupervised Outlier Node Detection on Static Attributed Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10071/) (2022)
- [Structure-free Graph Condensation: From Large-scale Graphs to Condensed Graph-free Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02664/) (2023)
- [Rethinking and Scaling Up Graph Contrastive Learning: An Extremely Efficient Approach with Group Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01535/) (2022)
- [Generative and Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09896/) (2021)
- [Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Graphs via Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09876/) (2021)
- [Beyond Smoothing: Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning with Edge Heterophily Discriminating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14065/) (2022)
- [Graph Anomaly Detection via Multi-Scale Contrastive Learning Networks with Augmented View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00535/) (2022)
- [ARC: A Generalist Graph Anomaly Detector with In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16771/) (2024)
- [GOOD-D: On Unsupervised Graph Out-Of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04208/) (2022)
- [GAD-NR: Graph Anomaly Detection via Neighborhood Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01951/) (2023)
- [Truncated Affinity Maximization: One-class Homophily Modeling for Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00006/) (2023)
- [Towards Self-Interpretable Graph-Level Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16520/) (2023)
- [Deep Graph Anomaly Detection: A Survey and New Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09957/) (2024)
- [BlindGuard: Safeguarding LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems under Unknown Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08127/) (2025)
- [PyGOD: A Python Library for Graph Outlier Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12095/) (2022)
- [Cross-Domain Graph Anomaly Detection via Anomaly-aware Contrastive Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01096/) (2022)
- [Federated Graph Semantic and Structural Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18937/) (2024)
- [Reconstruction Enhanced Multi-View Contrastive Learning for Anomaly Detection on Attributed Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04816/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Learning for Anomalous Channel Detection in EEG Graphs: Application to Seizure Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07448/) (2022)
- [SAD: Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection on Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13573/) (2023)
- [Zero-shot Generalist Graph Anomaly Detection with Unified Neighborhood Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14886/) (2024)
- [Heterogeneous Contrastive Learning for Foundation Models and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00225/) (2024)
- [PREM: A Simple Yet Effective Approach for Node-Level Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11676/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection in Computer Vision and Beyond: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05173/) (2022)
- [Graph Anomaly Detection with Graph Neural Networks: Current Status and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14930/) (2022)
- [SeeGera: Self-supervised Semi-implicit Graph Variational Auto-encoders with Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12458/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Anomaly detection on attributed networks attracts considerable research interests due to wide applications of attributed networks in modeling a wide range of complex systems. Recently, the deep learning-based anomaly detection methods have shown promising results over shallow approaches, especially on networks with high-dimensional attributes and complex structures. However, existing approaches, which employ graph autoencoder as their backbone, do not fully exploit the rich information of the network, resulting in suboptimal performance. Furthermore, these methods do not directly target anomaly detection in their learning objective and fail to scale to large networks due to the full graph training mechanism. To overcome these limitations, in this paper, we present a novel contrastive self-supervised learning framework for anomaly detection on attributed networks. Our framework fully exploits the local information from network data by sampling a novel type of contrastive instance pair, which can capture the relationship between each node and its neighboring substructure in an unsupervised way. Meanwhile, a well-designed graph neural network-based contrastive learning model is proposed to learn informative embedding from high-dimensional attributes and local structure and measure the agreement of each instance pairs with its outputted scores. The multi-round predicted scores by the contrastive learning model are further used to evaluate the abnormality of each node with statistical estimation. In this way, the learning model is trained by a specific anomaly detection-aware target. Furthermore, since the input of the graph neural network module is batches of instance pairs instead of the full network, our framework can adapt to large networks flexibly. Experimental results show that our proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods on all seven benchmark datasets.