DPGAD: Structure-Aware Dual-Path Attention Graph Node Anomaly Detection
Xinhua Dong, Hui Zhang, Hongmu Han, Zhigang Xu · Symmetry · 2025
Graph anomaly detection (GAD) is crucial for safeguarding the integrity and security of complex systems, such as social networks and financial transactions. Despite the advances made by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in the field of GAD, existing methods still exhibit limitations in capturing subtle structural anomaly patterns: they typically over-rely on reconstruction error, struggle to fully exploit structural similarity among nodes, and fail to effectively integrate attribute and structural information. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a structure-aware dual-path attention graph node anomaly detection method (DPGAD). DPGAD employs wavelet diffusion to extract network neighborhood features for each node while incorporating a dual attention mechanism to simultaneously capture attribute and structural similarities, thereby obtaining richer feature details. An adaptive gating mechanism is then introduced to dynamically adjust the fusion of attribute features and structural features. This allows the model to focus on the most relevant features for anomaly detection, enhancing its robustness and antinoise capability. Our experimental evaluation across multiple real-world datasets demonstrates that DPGAD consistently surpasses existing methods, achieving average improvements of 9.06% in AUC and 11% in F1-score. Especially in scenarios where structural similarity is crucial, DPGAD has a performance advantage of more than 20% compared with the most advanced methods.