# RAGFormer: Learning Semantic Attributes and Topological Structure for Fraud Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17472 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17472/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00414/) (2019)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07293/) (2019)
- [GraphSAINT: Graph Sampling Based Inductive Learning Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04931/) (2019)
- [Enhancing Graph Neural Network-based Fraud Detectors against Camouflaged Fraudsters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08692/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Library: A Graph-Centric, Highly-Performant Package for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01315/) (2019)
- [A Semi-supervised Graph Attentive Network for Financial Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01171/) (2020)
- [From Amateurs to Connoisseurs: Modeling the Evolution of User Expertise through Online Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1303.4402/) (2013)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Malicious Account Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12307/) (2020)
- [Alleviating the Inconsistency Problem of Applying Graph Neural Network to Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00625/) (2020)
- [Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Graphs via Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09876/) (2021)
- [Reinforced Neighborhood Selection Guided Multi-Relational Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07886/) (2021)
- [Label Information Enhanced Fraud Detection against Low Homophily in Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10407/) (2023)

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

- [Omega-N: Interpretable Structural Node Descriptors and Their Applicability Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01633/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fraud detection remains a challenging task due to the complex and deceptive nature of fraudulent activities. Current approaches primarily concentrate on learning only one perspective of the graph: either the topological structure of the graph or the attributes of individual nodes. However, we conduct empirical studies to reveal that these two types of features, while nearly orthogonal, are each independently effective. As a result, previous methods can not fully capture the comprehensive characteristics of the fraud graph. To address this dilemma, we present a novel framework called Relation-Aware GNN with transFormer~(RAGFormer) which simultaneously embeds both semantic and topological features into a target node. The simple yet effective network consists of a semantic encoder, a topology encoder, and an attention fusion module. The semantic encoder utilizes Transformer to learn semantic features and node interactions across different relations. We introduce Relation-Aware GNN as the topology encoder to learn topological features and node interactions within each relation. These two complementary features are interleaved through an attention fusion module to support prediction by both orthogonal features. Extensive experiments on two popular public datasets demonstrate that RAGFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance. The significant improvement of RAGFormer in an industrial credit card fraud detection dataset further validates the applicability of our method in real-world business scenarios.