Towards Generalist Graph-Level Anomaly Detection

Abstract

Graph-level anomaly detection (GLAD) aims to identify graphs that deviate significantly from the majority. While recent advances have achieved competitive performance, existing approaches mainly follow a dataset-specific paradigm, requiring substantial in-domain data and training cost when applied to new application scenarios. This limits their scalability and practicality in real-world applications where labeled data is scarce and diverse domains are continuously emerging. In this paper, we investigate the problem of generalist GLAD, which seeks to learn a single unified model capable of detecting anomalous graphs across multiple domains with minimal supervision on the target data. This problem introduces key challenges, including learning transferable patterns from heterogeneous graph datasets and effective adaptation under limited supervision. To address these challenges, we propose GenGLAD, a generalist GLAD approach that leverages discriminative subgraph extraction as the core mechanism to learn transferable anomaly knowledge and enable efficient adaptation to new domains. Specifically, GenGLAD employs a graph neural network-based discriminative subgraph extraction model to learn the anomaly-discriminative substructures that distinguish anomalous and normal graphs across diverse domains. During the test-time adaptation phase, multi-dimensional discrepancies between the extracted subgraph and multi-level contextual information are calculated to characterize anomalies from multiple perspectives. For efficient adaptation, a lightweight scoring module is introduced to automatically decide the most informative signals, improving robustness against misleading patterns. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves strong performance, superior generalization ability, and improved data efficiency compared to existing methods.