# CVTGAD: Simplified Transformer with Cross-View Attention for Unsupervised Graph-level Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02359 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02359/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2024.

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

- [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)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09406/) (2017)
- [TUDataset: A collection of benchmark datasets for learning with graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08663/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Measuring and Relieving the Over-smoothing Problem for Graph Neural Networks from the Topological View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03211/) (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)
- [InfoGraph: Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Graph-Level Representation Learning via Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01000/) (2019)
- [Stacked Cross Attention for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08024/) (2018)
- [TabTransformer: Tabular Data Modeling Using Contextual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06678/) (2020)
- [Uninformed Students: Student-Teacher Anomaly Detection with Discriminative Latent Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02357/) (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)
- [Propagation Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.3314/) (2014)
- [Federated Learning on Non-IID Graphs via Structural Knowledge Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13009/) (2022)
- [Rethinking and Scaling Up Graph Contrastive Learning: An Extremely Efficient Approach with Group Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01535/) (2022)
- [Deep Graph-level Anomaly Detection by Glocal Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10063/) (2021)
- [Beyond Smoothing: Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning with Edge Heterophily Discriminating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14065/) (2022)
- [On Using Classification Datasets to Evaluate Graph-Level Outlier Detection: Peculiar Observations and New Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12931/) (2020)
- [GOOD-D: On Unsupervised Graph Out-Of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04208/) (2022)
- [Learning Strong Graph Neural Networks with Weak Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18457/) (2023)
- [Unifying Graph Contrastive Learning with Flexible Contextual Scopes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08792/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Unifying Unsupervised Graph-Level Anomaly Detection and Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15523/) (2024)
- [HC-GLAD: Dual Hyperbolic Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Graph-Level Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02057/) (2024)
- [Learnable Kernel Density Estimation for Graphs and Its Application to Graph-Level Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21285/) (2025)
- [FANFOLD: Graph Normalizing Flows-driven Asymmetric Network for Unsupervised Graph-Level Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00383/) (2024)
- [From Pixels to Graphs: Deep Graph-Level Anomaly Detection on Dermoscopic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11826/) (2025)
- [GLADformer: A Mixed Perspective for Graph-level Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00734/) (2024)
- [GLADMamba: Unsupervised Graph-Level Anomaly Detection Powered by Selective State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17903/) (2025)
- [DeNoise: Learning Robust Graph Representations for Unsupervised Graph-Level Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04086/) (2025)
- [Learning to Explore: Policy-Guided Outlier Synthesis for Graph Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00602/) (2026)
- [GLASS: Graph-Language Alignment with Spherical Scoring for Transferable Graph-Level Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05253/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised graph-level anomaly detection (UGAD) has received remarkable performance in various critical disciplines, such as chemistry analysis and bioinformatics. Existing UGAD paradigms often adopt data augmentation techniques to construct multiple views, and then employ different strategies to obtain representations from different views for jointly conducting UGAD. However, most previous works only considered the relationship between nodes/graphs from a limited receptive field, resulting in some key structure patterns and feature information being neglected. In addition, most existing methods consider different views separately in a parallel manner, which is not able to explore the inter-relationship across different views directly. Thus, a method with a larger receptive field that can explore the inter-relationship across different views directly is in need. In this paper, we propose a novel Simplified Transformer with Cross-View Attention for Unsupervised Graph-level Anomaly Detection, namely, CVTGAD. To increase the receptive field, we construct a simplified transformer-based module, exploiting the relationship between nodes/graphs from both intra-graph and inter-graph perspectives. Furthermore, we design a cross-view attention mechanism to directly exploit the view co-occurrence between different views, bridging the inter-view gap at node level and graph level. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to apply transformer and cross attention to UGAD, which realizes graph neural network and transformer working collaboratively. Extensive experiments on 15 real-world datasets of 3 fields demonstrate the superiority of CVTGAD on the UGAD task. The code is available at urlhttps://github.com/jindongli-Ai/CVTGAD.