# Autonomous Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Graph-Based Fraud Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22949 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22949/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 4 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/knowledge-and-tool-augmented-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Deep Graph Library: A Graph-Centric, Highly-Performant Package for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01315/) (2019)
- [Partitioning Message Passing for Graph Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00020/) (2024)
- [Can LLMs Find Fraudsters? Multi-level LLM Enhanced Graph Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11997/) (2025)

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

- [Toward Auditable Fraud Detection: Combining Graph Features, Model Explanations, and Agentic Case Investigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19266/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph-based fraud detection on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) requires jointly modeling rich textual semantics and relational dependencies. However, existing LLM-enhanced GNN approaches are constrained by predefined prompting and decoupled training pipelines, limiting reasoning autonomy and weakening semantic-structural alignment. We propose FraudCoT, a unified framework that advances TAG-based fraud detection through autonomous, graph-aware chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and scalable LLM-GNN co-training. To address the limitations of predefined prompts, we introduce a fraud-aware selective CoT distillation mechanism that generates diverse reasoning paths and enhances semantic-structural understanding. These distilled CoTs are integrated into node texts, providing GNNs with enriched, multi-hop semantic and structural cues for fraud detection. Furthermore, we develop an efficient asymmetric co-training strategy that enables end-to-end optimization while significantly reducing the computational cost of naive joint training. Extensive experiments on public and industrial benchmarks demonstrate that FraudCoT achieves up to 8.8% AUPRC improvement over state-of-the-art methods and delivers up to 1,066x speedup in training throughput, substantially advancing both detection performance and efficiency.