# CRoC: Context Refactoring Contrast for Graph Anomaly Detection with Limited Supervision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12278 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12278/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Measuring and Relieving the Over-smoothing Problem for Graph Neural Networks from the Topological View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03211/) (2019)
- [Predicting Dynamic Embedding Trajectory in Temporal Interaction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01207/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Graph Random Neural Network for Semi-Supervised Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11079/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Graph Neural Networks for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15508/) (2022)
- [Large-Scale Representation Learning on Graphs via Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06514/) (2021)
- [Multi-Stage Self-Supervised Learning for Graph Convolutional Networks on Graphs with Few Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.11038/) (2019)
- [From Amateurs to Connoisseurs: Modeling the Evolution of User Expertise through Online Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1303.4402/) (2013)
- [Alleviating the Inconsistency Problem of Applying Graph Neural Network to Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00625/) (2020)
- [DGraph: A Large-Scale Financial Dataset for Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03579/) (2022)
- [GADBench: Revisiting and Benchmarking Supervised Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12251/) (2023)
- [ARC: A Generalist Graph Anomaly Detector with In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16771/) (2024)
- [GAD-NR: Graph Anomaly Detection via Neighborhood Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01951/) (2023)
- [Truncated Affinity Maximization: One-class Homophily Modeling for Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00006/) (2023)
- [Alleviating Structural Distribution Shift in Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14155/) (2024)
- [Semi-supervised Credit Card Fraud Detection via Attribute-Driven Graph Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18287/) (2024)
- [ADA-GAD: Anomaly-Denoised Autoencoders for Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14535/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Graph Representation Learning for Black Market Account Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02679/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used as the engine for various graph-related tasks, with their effectiveness in analyzing graph-structured data. However, training robust GNNs often demands abundant labeled data, which is a critical bottleneck in real-world applications. This limitation severely impedes progress in Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD), where anomalies are inherently rare, costly to label, and may actively camouflage their patterns to evade detection. To address these problems, we propose Context Refactoring Contrast (CRoC), a simple yet effective framework that trains GNNs for GAD by jointly leveraging limited labeled and abundant unlabeled data. Different from previous works, CRoC exploits the class imbalance inherent in GAD to refactor the context of each node, which builds augmented graphs by recomposing the attributes of nodes while preserving their interaction patterns. Furthermore, CRoC encodes heterogeneous relations separately and integrates them into the message-passing process, enhancing the model's capacity to capture complex interaction semantics. These operations preserve node semantics while encouraging robustness to adversarial camouflage, enabling GNNs to uncover intricate anomalous cases. In the training stage, CRoC is further integrated with the contrastive learning paradigm. This allows GNNs to effectively harness unlabeled data during joint training, producing richer, more discriminative node embeddings. CRoC is evaluated on seven real-world GAD datasets with varying scales. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CRoC achieves up to 14% AUC improvement over baseline GNNs and outperforms state-of-the-art GAD methods under limited-label settings.
