# Boosting Bot Detection via Heterophily-Aware Representation Learning and Prototype-Guided Cluster Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00989 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00989/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Deep Embedding for Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06335/) (2015)
- [GraphMAE: Self-Supervised Masked Graph Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10803/) (2022)
- [Beyond Low-frequency Information in Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00797/) (2021)
- [Graph Self-Supervised Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00111/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Graph Neural Networks: A Unified Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10757/) (2021)
- [Finding Global Homophily in Graph Neural Networks When Meeting Heterophily](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07308/) (2022)
- [Graph Neural Networks for Graphs with Heterophily: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07082/) (2022)
- [From Canonical Correlation Analysis to Self-supervised Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12484/) (2021)
- [MaskViT: Masked Visual Pre-Training for Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11894/) (2022)
- [What's Behind the Mask: Understanding Masked Graph Modeling for Graph Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10053/) (2022)
- [Online Human-Bot Interactions: Detection, Estimation, and Characterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03107/) (2017)
- [Scalable and Generalizable Social Bot Detection through Data Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09179/) (2019)
- [TwiBot-20: A Comprehensive Twitter Bot Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13088/) (2021)
- [A Decade of Social Bot Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03604/) (2020)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09957/) (2022)
- [TwiBot-22: Towards Graph-Based Twitter Bot Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04564/) (2022)
- [Heterogeneity-aware Twitter Bot Detection with Relational Graph Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02927/) (2021)
- [BotRGCN: Twitter Bot Detection with Relational Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13092/) (2021)
- [MGAE: Masked Autoencoders for Self-Supervised Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02534/) (2022)
- [Disinformation and Social Bot Operations in the Run Up to the 2017 French Presidential Election](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00086/) (2017)
- [Graph Masked Autoencoder for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04619/) (2023)
- [BotMoE: Twitter Bot Detection with Community-Aware Mixtures of Modal-Specific Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06280/) (2023)
- [MGTAB: A Multi-Relational Graph-Based Twitter Account Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01123/) (2023)
- [SeBot: Structural Entropy Guided Multi-View Contrastive Learning for Social Bot Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11225/) (2024)
- [GAMC: An Unsupervised Method for Fake News Detection using Graph Autoencoder with Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05739/) (2023)
- [Simplistic Collection and Labeling Practices Limit the Utility of Benchmark Datasets for Twitter Bot Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07015/) (2023)
- [FedACK: Federated Adversarial Contrastive Knowledge Distillation for Cross-Lingual and Cross-Model Social Bot Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07113/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [RoBCtrl: Attacking GNN-Based Social Bot Detectors via Reinforced Manipulation of Bots Control Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16035/) (2025)
- [LiveGraph: Active-Structure Neural Re-ranking for Exercise Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17036/) (2026)
- [Beyond the Academic Monoculture: A Unified Framework and Industrial Perspective for Attributed Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20829/) (2026)
- [SAHG: Sector-Anisotropic Hyperbolic Graph Model for Social Bot Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30166/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting social media bots is essential for maintaining the security and trustworthiness of social networks. While contemporary graph-based detection methods demonstrate promising results, their practical application is limited by label reliance and poor generalization capability across diverse communities. Generative Graph Self-Supervised Learning (GSL) presents a promising paradigm to overcome these limitations, yet existing approaches predominantly follow the homophily assumption and fail to capture the global patterns in the graph, which potentially diminishes their effectiveness when facing the challenges of interaction camouflage and distributed deployment in bot detection scenarios. To this end, we propose BotHP, a generative GSL framework tailored to boost graph-based bot detectors through heterophily-aware representation learning and prototype-guided cluster discovery. Specifically, BotHP leverages a dual-encoder architecture, consisting of a graph-aware encoder to capture node commonality and a graph-agnostic encoder to preserve node uniqueness. This enables the simultaneous modeling of both homophily and heterophily, effectively countering the interaction camouflage issue. Additionally, BotHP incorporates a prototype-guided cluster discovery pretext task to model the latent global consistency of bot clusters and identify spatially dispersed yet semantically aligned bot collectives. Extensive experiments on two real-world bot detection benchmarks demonstrate that BotHP consistently boosts graph-based bot detectors, improving detection performance, alleviating label reliance, and enhancing generalization capability.