# CAT: Can Trust be Predicted with Context-Awareness in Dynamic Heterogeneous Networks?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11352 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11352/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Link Prediction Based on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09691/) (2018)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07293/) (2019)
- [Graph Neural Networks for Social Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07243/) (2019)
- [Measuring and Relieving the Over-smoothing Problem for Graph Neural Networks from the Topological View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03211/) (2019)
- [Temporal Graph Networks for Deep Learning on Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10637/) (2020)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Temporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07962/) (2020)
- [GNNGuard: Defending Graph Neural Networks against Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08149/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Training and Robustness for Multiple Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.13000/) (2019)
- [Do We Really Need Complicated Model Architectures For Temporal Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11636/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Graph Neural Networks for Link Prediction: Current Pitfalls and New Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10453/) (2023)
- [UNICORN: Runtime Provenance-Based Detector for Advanced Persistent Threats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01525/) (2020)
- [ConsisRec: Enhancing GNN for Social Recommendation via Consistent Neighbor Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02254/) (2021)
- [A Hard Label Black-box Adversarial Attack Against Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09513/) (2021)
- [Modeling Dynamic Heterogeneous Network for Link Prediction using Hierarchical Attention with Temporal RNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01024/) (2020)
- [Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13889/) (2021)
- [Can Large Language Models Improve the Adversarial Robustness of Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08685/) (2024)
- [MAGIC: Detecting Advanced Persistent Threats via Masked Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09831/) (2023)
- [Exploring ChatGPT's Capabilities on Vulnerability Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06530/) (2023)
- [Graph-based Security and Privacy Analytics via Collective Classification with Joint Weight Learning and Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01661/) (2018)
- [TrustGuard: GNN-based Robust and Explainable Trust Evaluation with Dynamicity Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13339/) (2023)
- [Learning on Graphs with Large Language Models(LLMs): A Deep Dive into Model Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12068/) (2024)
- [TrustGNN: Graph Neural Network based Trust Evaluation via Learnable Propagative and Composable Nature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12784/) (2022)
- [KGTrust: Evaluating Trustworthiness of SIoT via Knowledge Enhanced Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11396/) (2023)
- [Spear and Shield: Adversarial Attacks and Defense Methods for Model-Based Link Prediction on Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10779/) (2023)
- [GRID: Protecting Training Graph from Link Stealing Attacks on GNN Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10985/) (2025)
- [Trust Assessment in Online Social Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10066/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [TCHG: Tri-Trust Conditioned Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Reliable Dynamic Trust Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16611/) (2026)
- [LLM4Trust: Exploring the Capabilities of Large Language Models for Trust Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33521/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Trust prediction provides valuable support for decision-making, risk mitigation, and system security enhancement. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising approach for trust prediction, owing to their ability to learn expressive node representations that capture intricate trust relationships within a network. However, current GNN-based trust prediction models face several limitations: (i) Most of them fail to capture trust dynamicity, leading to questionable inferences. (ii) They rarely consider the heterogeneous nature of real-world networks, resulting in a loss of rich semantics. (iii) None of them support context-awareness, a basic property of trust, making prediction results coarse-grained. To this end, we propose CAT, the first Context-Aware GNN-based Trust prediction model that supports trust dynamicity and accurately represents real-world heterogeneity. CAT consists of a graph construction layer, an embedding layer, a heterogeneous attention layer, and a prediction layer. It handles dynamic graphs using continuous-time representations and captures temporal information through a time encoding function. To model graph heterogeneity and leverage semantic information, CAT employs a dual attention mechanism that identifies the importance of different node types and nodes within each type. For context-awareness, we introduce a new notion of meta-paths to extract contextual features. By constructing context embeddings and integrating a context-aware aggregator, CAT can predict both context-aware trust and overall trust. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that CAT outperforms five groups of baselines in trust prediction, while exhibiting strong scalability to large-scale graphs and robustness against both trust-oriented and GNN-oriented attacks.