arXiv · 2605.25429
Rethinking Feature Alignment in Generalist Graph Anomaly Detection: A Relational Fingerprint-based Approach
Abstract
Generalist graph anomaly detection (GAD) aims to detect anomalies on unseen graphs without graph-specific retraining. Nevertheless, existing approaches primarily focus on aligning heterogeneous features across different data domains via PCA-based projection, which harmonizes feature dimensions ignores feature semantics. As a result, GAD models fail to learn transferable semantic knowledge, and even exhibit negative transfer on unseen graphs. To address this issue, we propose a Relational Fingerprint-based generalist GAD approach (ReFi-GAD for short), aligning heterogeneous raw features with a universal and semantics-aware Relational Fingerprint (ReFi) that encodes anomaly-indicative cues from both contextual and structural perspectives. Building on ReFi, we design a fingerprint-grounded generalist GAD model, which combines a transformer-based encoder to capture domain-invariant knowledge with an SNR-guided refinement module for domain-specific adaptation. Extensive experiments on 14 datasets demonstrate that ReFi-GAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
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Yujing Liu, Yixin Liu, Yu Zheng, Alan Wee-Chung Liew, Xiaofeng Cao, Shirui Pan. 2026-05-25. Rethinking Feature Alignment in Generalist Graph Anomaly Detection: A Relational Fingerprint-based Approach. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25429
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