# From Unsupervised to Few-shot Graph Anomaly Detection: A Multi-scale Contrastive Learning Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.05525 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05525/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2022.

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

- [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)
- [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)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [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 Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14945/) (2020)
- [GCC: Graph Contrastive Coding for Graph Neural Network Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09963/) (2020)
- [Deep Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02694/) (2019)
- [Graph Self-Supervised Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00111/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Anomaly Detection with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07178/) (2021)
- [Graph Representation Learning via Graphical Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01169/) (2020)
- [Anomaly Detection on Attributed Networks via Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00113/) (2021)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Deviation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08623/) (2019)
- [A Semi-supervised Graph Attentive Network for Financial Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01171/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Multi-Channel Hypergraph Convolutional Network for Social Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06448/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale Contrastive Siamese Networks for Self-Supervised Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05682/) (2021)
- [Generative and Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09896/) (2021)
- [Few-shot Network Anomaly Detection via Cross-network Meta-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11165/) (2021)
- [Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Graphs via Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09876/) (2021)
- [Multi-view Graph Contrastive Representation Learning for Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11711/) (2020)
- [SpecAE: Spectral AutoEncoder for Anomaly Detection in Attributed Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03849/) (2019)
- [Scalable Anomaly Ranking of Attributed Neighborhoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.06711/) (2016)
- [Towards Graph Self-Supervised Learning with Contrastive Adjusted Zooming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10698/) (2021)
- [Beyond Low-pass Filtering: Graph Convolutional Networks with Automatic Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04755/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Truncated Affinity Maximization: One-class Homophily Modeling for Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00006/) (2023)
- [Correlation-aware Spatial-Temporal Graph Learning for Multivariate Time-series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08390/) (2023)
- [Projective Ranking-based GNN Evasion Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12993/) (2022)
- [Few-shot Message-Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10370/) (2023)
- [Towards One-for-All Anomaly Detection for Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14407/) (2026)
- [FedCIGAR: A Personalized Reconstruction Approach for Federated Graph-level Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09428/) (2026)
- [Towards Cross-domain Few-shot Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08629/) (2024)
- [Beyond a Single Perspective: Text Anomaly Detection with Multi-View Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17786/) (2026)
- [MetaGAD: Meta Representation Adaptation for Few-Shot Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10668/) (2023)
- [GraphGuard: Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for Credit-Card Fraud Detection in Multi-Relational Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12440/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Graph Anomaly Detection via Multi-Hypersphere Heterophilic Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12037/) (2025)
- [Flex-GAD : Flexible Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25809/) (2025)
- [SIM: Subspace Interaction-based Method for Token-Level Text Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08200/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Anomaly detection from graph data is an important data mining task in many applications such as social networks, finance, and e-commerce. Existing efforts in graph anomaly detection typically only consider the information in a single scale (view), thus inevitably limiting their capability in capturing anomalous patterns in complex graph data. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework, graph ANomaly dEtection framework with Multi-scale cONtrastive lEarning (ANEMONE in short). By using a graph neural network as a backbone to encode the information from multiple graph scales (views), we learn better representation for nodes in a graph. In maximizing the agreements between instances at both the patch and context levels concurrently, we estimate the anomaly score of each node with a statistical anomaly estimator according to the degree of agreement from multiple perspectives. To further exploit a handful of ground-truth anomalies (few-shot anomalies) that may be collected in real-life applications, we further propose an extended algorithm, ANEMONE-FS, to integrate valuable information in our method. We conduct extensive experiments under purely unsupervised settings and few-shot anomaly detection settings, and we demonstrate that the proposed method ANEMONE and its variant ANEMONE-FS consistently outperform state-of-the-art algorithms on six benchmark datasets.