Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely used for learning representations of graph-structured data, achieving remarkable success in various graph-related Web applications, such as fraud detection. To generate node representations, GNN-based models operate message-passing mechanisms that aim to smooth the learned representations in a local neighborhood. However, fraudsters increasingly employ sophisticated “camouflage” tactics, exhibiting normal behaviors by strategically forming numerous connections with legitimate entities. As a result, existing GNN-based methods struggle to effectively tackle such fraudulent activities due to their reliance on homophily-based message-passing architectures. These methods fail to generate discriminative representations, which is crucial for distinguishing fraudsters from benign entities. To address this problem, we propose a novel Discriminative Enhanced Aggregation Graph Neural Network-based FraudDEtectioNMoDel (DEFEND) . DEFEND incorporates tailored discriminative mechanisms that strengthen representation learning at two complementary levels: (i) intra-relation and (ii) inter-relation. While prior approaches primarily focus on intra-relation patterns and overlook inter-relation information, DEFEND integrates both to capture subtle inconsistencies in fraudster behavior. Specifically, an edge discriminating mechanism classifies neighborhoods into homophily or heterophily-based views by leveraging node attributes and structural characteristics, and a camouflage-aware dual-channel aggregation module captures different frequencies of information tailored to these views to generate rich intra-relation node representations. While prior approaches typically rely on intra-relation information within each relation type, they overlook the discriminative signals that arise from correlations across different relations. In DEFEND, we observe that fraudsters often avoid forming consistent cross-relation interactions, whereas benign entities tend to establish them more frequently. This discrepancy creates a distinctive behavioral pattern. To capture this, we introduce an inter-relation correlation mechanism that correlates a node’s intra-relation representations across multiple relation types using an attention-based weighting scheme. By adaptively weighing the importance of each relation and integrating their contributions, DEFEND enhances the discriminative power of node representations. This mechanism enables the model to leverage both intra-relation and inter-relation levels of information, leading to richer and more robust representations for fraud detection. Finally, a multi-relation combination module aggregates information across different relation types, emphasizing the importance of node–relation pairs in the embedding. We conducted extensive experiments on two real-world fraud datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model, and our results show that DEFEND outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. The source codes and datasets of our work are available at https://github.com/VenusHaghighi/DEFEND .

Abstract Fraud detection in online networks has become increasingly challenging as fraudsters adopt sophisticated camouflage tactics to evade detection, making it imperative to combat their deceptive strategies. Graph-based fraud detection has gained significant attention in recent years, reflecting its growing potential to mitigate sophisticated fraudulent activities. The main objective of graph-based fraud detection is to distinguish between fraudsters and normal entities within graphs. While real-world networks contain complex, high-order relationships, existing graph-based fraud detection methods focus solely on pairwise interactions, overlooking non-pairwise relationships and the broader dependencies among entities within fraud graphs. Thus, we highlight the importance of exploring non-pairwise relationships to build a more effective fraud detection model. In this paper, we propose TROPICAL, a novel TRansfOrmer-based hyPergraph LearnIng framework for detecting CAmouflaged maLicious actors in online social networks. To capture comprehensive high-order relations, we construct a hypergraph from the original input graph. However, constructing the hypergraph can be computationally intensive. TROPICAL addresses this challenge by carefully selecting moderate hyperparameters, creating a balance between computational efficiency and effectively capturing high-order relationships. TROPICAL learns node representations by processing multiple hyperedge groups and incorporates positional encodings into the aggregated information to enhance their distinctiveness. The aggregated sequential information is then passed through a transformer encoder, enabling the model to generate rich, high-order representations to detect camouflaged fraudsters. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate TROPICAL’s superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art fraud detection models. The source codes and the datasets of our work are available at https://github.com/VenusHaghighi/TROPICAL .

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm in which clients collaboratively train models in a privacy-preserving manner. While centralized FL (CFL) suffers from single points of failure and performance bottlenecks, decentralized FL (DFL), which depends on inter-client communication, has emerged to eliminate the need of a central entity. However, due to lack of the coordination of a central server, heterogeneous data distribution across clients makes local models in DFL inclined to diverge towards their local objectives, resulting in poor model accuracy. Moreover, each client in DFL needs to communicate with multiple neighbors, yielding a heavy communication load. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel DFL framework called DFLStar, which can improve DFL from two perspectives. First, to avoid significantly diverging towards local data, DFLStar incorporates self-knowledge distillation to enhance the local model training by assimilating knowledge from the aggregated model. Second, clients in DFLStar identify and only select the most informative neighbors (based on the last layer model similarity) for parameter exchange, thereby minimizing the communication overhead. Our experimental results on two real datasets demonstrate that DFLStar significantly improves both communication overhead and training time compared to traditional DFL algorithms while achieving a specific target accuracy. Furthermore, within a fixed training duration, DFLStar constantly obtains the highest model accuracy compared to the baselines.

Graph-based fraud detection has attracted increasing attention in recent years, reflecting its growing potential in mitigating sophisticated fraudulent activities. The main objective of graph-based fraud detection is to discern between fraud-sters and normal entities within graphs. As fraudsters adopt increasingly sophisticated camouflage tactics, combating them has become an urgent task. Despite the complex interactions within real-world networks involving high-order relations, ex-isting graph-based fraud detection methods often neglect non-pairwise relationships among entities in graphs. Thus, we empha-size the significance of investigating beyond pairwise relationships for building an effective fraud detection model. In this paper, we propose constructing a hypergraph from the original input graph to encapsulate comprehensive high-order relations and present TROPICAL, a novel TRansfOrmer-based hyPergraph LearnIng for detecting CAmouflaged maLicious actors in online social networks. TROPICAL learns representations by processing different hyperedge groups and incorporates positional encodings into the aggregated information to enhance their distinctiveness. Subsequently, the model feeds the learned aggregated sequential information into the transformer encoder, achieving rich rep-resentations for effective camouflaged fraudster detection. The superiority of TROPICAL is demonstrated through experiments conducted on two real-world datasets, compared against the state-of-the-art fraud detection models. The source codes and datasets of our work are available at https://github.comNenusHaghighi/TROPICAL.