# PREM: A Simple Yet Effective Approach for Node-Level Graph Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11676 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11676/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04592/) (2020)
- [GraphSAINT: Graph Sampling Based Inductive Learning Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04931/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Diffusion Improves Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05485/) (2019)
- [Reasoning on Graphs: Faithful and Interpretable Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01061/) (2023)
- [Deep Convolutional Networks on Graph-Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05163/) (2015)
- [Anomaly Detection on Attributed Networks via Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00113/) (2021)
- [Scaling Graph Neural Networks with Approximate PageRank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01570/) (2020)
- [Towards Unsupervised Deep Graph Structure Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06367/) (2022)
- [Federated Learning on Non-IID Graphs via Structural Knowledge Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13009/) (2022)
- [AnomalyDAE: Dual autoencoder for anomaly detection on attributed networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03665/) (2020)
- [LanczosNet: Multi-Scale Deep Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01484/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [GOOD-D: On Unsupervised Graph Out-Of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04208/) (2022)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [ARC: A Generalist Graph Anomaly Detector with In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16771/) (2024)
- [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)
- [A Label-Free Heterophily-Guided Approach for Unsupervised Graph Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13308/) (2025)
- [Unifying Unsupervised Graph-Level Anomaly Detection and Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15523/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Graph Unlearning: A General and Efficient Post-Processing Method via Gradient Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14407/) (2024)
- [Safety in Graph Machine Learning: Threats and Safeguards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11034/) (2024)
- [SmoothGNN: Smoothing-aware GNN for Unsupervised Node Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17525/) (2024)
- [From Few-Shot to Zero-Shot: Towards Generalist Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18793/) (2026)
- [Towards Cross-domain Few-shot Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08629/) (2024)
- [Towards Anomaly Detection on Relational Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18621/) (2026)
- [Semi-supervised Graph Anomaly Detection via Robust Homophily Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15448/) (2025)
- [Str-GCL: Structural Commonsense Driven Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07141/) (2025)
- [CAMERA: Adapting to Semantic Camouflage in Unsupervised Text-Attributed Graph Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20032/) (2026)
- [UMGAD: Unsupervised Multiplex Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12556/) (2024)
- [MEATRD: Multimodal Anomalous Tissue Region Detection Enhanced with Spatial Transcriptomics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10659/) (2024)
- [Semi-supervised Anomaly Detection with Extremely Limited Labels in Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15035/) (2025)
- [When Agents Go Rogue: Activation-Based Detection of Malicious Behaviors in Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06807/) (2026)
- [Robust Anomaly Detection with Graph Neural Networks using Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13954/) (2025)
- [Combining Euclidean and Hyperbolic Representations for Node-level Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11827/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Cybersecurity Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26307/) (2025)
- [Learning Feature Encoder with Synthetic Anomalies for Weakly Supervised Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11749/) (2026)
- [DDGAD: Disagreement-Driven Graph Anomaly Detection via Adapt-Then-Combine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26446/) (2026)
- [RagGAD: Rationale-Aware Conditional Gaussian Mixture Normalizing Flow for Unsupervised Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16018/) (2026)
- [SIM: Subspace Interaction-based Method for Token-Level Text Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08200/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Node-level graph anomaly detection (GAD) plays a critical role in identifying anomalous nodes from graph-structured data in various domains such as medicine, social networks, and e-commerce. However, challenges have arisen due to the diversity of anomalies and the dearth of labeled data. Existing methodologies - reconstruction-based and contrastive learning - while effective, often suffer from efficiency issues, stemming from their complex objectives and elaborate modules. To improve the efficiency of GAD, we introduce a simple method termed PREprocessing and Matching (PREM for short). Our approach streamlines GAD, reducing time and memory consumption while maintaining powerful anomaly detection capabilities. Comprising two modules - a pre-processing module and an ego-neighbor matching module - PREM eliminates the necessity for message-passing propagation during training, and employs a simple contrastive loss, leading to considerable reductions in training time and memory usage. Moreover, through rigorous evaluations of five real-world datasets, our method demonstrated robustness and effectiveness. Notably, when validated on the ACM dataset, PREM achieved a 5% improvement in AUC, a 9-fold increase in training speed, and sharply reduce memory usage compared to the most efficient baseline.