# MetaGAD: Meta Representation Adaptation for Few-Shot Graph Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10668 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10668/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Graph Neural Networks: A Review of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08434/) (2018)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [Learning Imbalanced Datasets with Label-Distribution-Aware Margin Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07413/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [MAD-X: An Adapter-Based Framework for Multi-Task Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00052/) (2020)
- [AdapterHub: A Framework for Adapting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07779/) (2020)
- [Graph Self-Supervised Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00111/) (2021)
- [A Review of Relational Machine Learning for Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.00759/) (2015)
- [Enhancing Graph Neural Network-based Fraud Detectors against Camouflaged Fraudsters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08692/) (2020)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Anomaly Detection with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07178/) (2021)
- [Anomaly Detection on Attributed Networks via Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00113/) (2021)
- [A Semi-supervised Graph Attentive Network for Financial Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01171/) (2020)
- [Meta-GNN: On Few-shot Node Classification in Graph Meta-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09718/) (2019)
- [Graph Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning on Attributed Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12739/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Graph Learning for Molecular Property Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07916/) (2021)
- [BOND: Benchmarking Unsupervised Outlier Node Detection on Static Attributed Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10071/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Graph Few-shot Learning via Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03053/) (2019)
- [Graph Anomaly Detection via Multi-Scale Contrastive Learning Networks with Augmented View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00535/) (2022)
- [PyGOD: A Python Library for Graph Outlier Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12095/) (2022)
- [Reconstruction Enhanced Multi-View Contrastive Learning for Anomaly Detection on Attributed Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04816/) (2022)
- [Meta Propagation Networks for Graph Few-shot Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09810/) (2021)
- [MetaXL: Meta Representation Transformation for Low-resource Cross-lingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07908/) (2021)
- [From Unsupervised to Few-shot Graph Anomaly Detection: A Multi-scale Contrastive Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05525/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Survey of Generalization of Graph Anomaly Detection: From Transfer Learning to Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06609/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph anomaly detection has long been an important problem in various domains pertaining to information security such as financial fraud, social spam and network intrusion. The majority of existing methods are performed in an unsupervised manner, as labeled anomalies in a large scale are often too expensive to acquire. However, the identified anomalies may turn out to be uninteresting data instances due to the lack of prior knowledge. In real-world scenarios, it is often feasible to obtain limited labeled anomalies, which have great potential to advance graph anomaly detection. However, the work exploring limited labeled anomalies and a large amount of unlabeled nodes in graphs to detect anomalies is relatively limited. Therefore, in this paper, we study an important problem of few-shot graph anomaly detection. Nonetheless, it is challenging to fully leverage the information of few-shot anomalous nodes due to the irregularity of anomalies and the overfitting issue in the few-shot learning. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a novel meta-learning based framework, MetaGAD, that learns to adapt the knowledge from self-supervised learning to few-shot supervised learning for graph anomaly detection. In specific, we formulate the problem as a bi-level optimization, ensuring MetaGAD converging to minimizing the validation loss, thus enhancing the generalization capacity. The comprehensive experiments on six real-world datasets with synthetic anomalies and "organic" anomalies (available in the datasets) demonstrate the effectiveness of MetaGAD in detecting anomalies with few-shot anomalies. The code is available at https://github.com/XiongxiaoXu/MetaGAD.