MEGAD: A Memory-Efficient Framework for Large-Scale Attributed Graph Anomaly Detection

MEGAD: A Memory-Efficient Framework for Large-Scale Attributed Graph Anomaly Detection

Yifan Zhang, Haolong Xiang, Xiaolong Xu, Zishun Rui, Xiaoyong Li, Lianyong Qi, Fei Dai

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3651-3659. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/406

Graph anomaly detection (GAD), with its ability to accurately identify anomalous patterns in graph data, plays a vital role in areas such as network security, social media platforms, and fraud detection. Graph autoencoder-based methods are widely used for GAD due to their efficiency and effectiveness in capturing complex patterns and learning meaningful representations. However, the above methods are constrained by hardware memory, hindering the detection for large-scale graph data. In this paper, we propose a Memory-Efficient framework for large-scale attributed Graph Anomaly Detection (MEGAD). Specifically, MEGAD first generates node embeddings and then refines them through a lightweight joint optimization model, ensuring minimal memory overhead. The optimized embeddings are subsequently fed into a detector to compute anomaly scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets while significantly reducing memory consumption on large-scale graphs.
Keywords:
Data Mining: DM: Anomaly/outlier detection
Data Mining: DM: Mining graphs