Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) is critical in applications such as fraud prevention, cybersecurity, and social governance. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in detecting anomalies on homogeneous graphs, they face fundamental challenges in real-world heterogeneous settings involving diverse node types and imbalanced semantic richness. In heterogeneous graphs, nodes often vary significantly in semantic richness, with anomalies potentially spanning multiple types and emerging implicitly through cross-type dependencies. We identify two core limitations of existing methods: (i) the ineffective propagation of discriminative anomaly cues from informative to sparse nodes due to semantic imbalance, and (ii) conflicting optimization objectives arising from joint detection across multiple node types. To address these issues, we propose CSA-MTHGAD, a novel framework that integrates smoothness-guided cross-type semantic alignment with dynamic multi-task learning. It selectively propagates anomaly-sensitive features across types and harmonizes task-specific gradients through adaptive projection and weighting.To facilitate research, we employ two real-world heterogeneous benchmarks in the domain of social governance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CSA-MTHGAD achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines in accuracy, robustness, and generalization for multi-type anomaly detection.

Graph Masked Autoencoders (GMAEs) have emerged as a notable self-supervised learning approach for graph-structured data. Existing GMAE models primarily focus on reconstructing node-level information, categorizing them as single-scale GMAEs. This methodology, while effective in certain contexts, tends to overlook the complex hierarchical structures inherent in many real-world graphs. For instance, molecular graphs exhibit a clear hierarchical organization in the form of the atoms-functional groups-molecules structure. Therefore, the inability of single-scale GMAE models to incorporate these hierarchical relationships often results in an inadequate capture of crucial high-level graph information, leading to a noticeable decline in performance. To address this limitation, we propose Hierarchical Graph Masked AutoEncoders (Hi-GMAE), a novel multi-scale GMAE framework designed to handle the hierarchical structures within graphs. First, Hi-GMAE constructs a multi-scale graph hierarchy through graph pooling, enabling the exploration of graph structures across different granularity levels. To ensure masking uniformity of subgraphs across these scales, we propose a novel coarse-to-fine strategy that initiates masking at the coarsest scale and progressively back-projects the mask to finer scales. Furthermore, we integrate a gradual recovery strategy with the masking process to mitigate the learning challenges posed by completely masked subgraphs. Diverging from the standard graph neural network (GNN) used in GMAE models, Hi-GMAE modifies its encoder and decoder into hierarchical structures. This entails using GNN at the finer scales for detailed local graph analysis and employing a graph transformer at coarser scales to capture global information. Such a design enables Hi-GMAE to effectively capture the multi-level information inherent in complex graph structures. Our experiments on 17 graph datasets, covering two graph learning tasks, consistently demonstrate that Hi-GMAE outperforms 29 state-of-the-art self-supervised competitors in capturing comprehensive graph information.

Graph similarity learning is a significant and fundamental issue in the theory and analysis of graphs, which has been applied in a variety of fields, including object tracking, recommender systems, similarity search, and so on. Recent methods for graph similarity learning that utilize deep learning typically share two deficiencies: (1) they leverage graph neural networks as backbones for learning graph representations but have not well captured the complex information inside data, and (2) they employ a cross-graph attention mechanism for graph similarity learning, which is computationally expensive. Taking these limitations into consideration, a method for graph similarity learning is devised in this study, namely, Contrastive Graph Similarity Network (CGSim). To enhance graph similarity learning, CGSim makes use of the complementary information of two input graphs and captures pairwise relations in a contrastive learning framework. By developing a dual contrastive learning module with a node-graph matching and a graph-graph matching mechanism, our method significantly reduces the quadratic time complexity for cross-graph interaction modeling to linear time complexity. Jointly learning in an end-to-end framework, the graph representation embedding module and the well-designed contrastive learning module can be beneficial to one another. A comprehensive series of experiments indicate that CGSim outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on six datasets and significantly reduces the computational cost, which demonstrates our CGSim model’s superiority over other baselines.

Recommender systems are essential to various fields, e.g., e-commerce, e-learning, and streaming media. At present, graph neural networks (GNNs) for session-based recommendations normally can only recommend items existing in users’ historical sessions. As a result, these GNNs have difficulty recommending items that users have never interacted with (new items), which leads to a phenomenon of information cocoon. Therefore, it is necessary to recommend new items to users. As there is no interaction between new items and users, we cannot include new items when building session graphs for GNN session-based recommender systems. Thus, it is challenging to recommend new items for users when using GNN-based methods. We regard this challenge as “GNN Session-based New Item Recommendation (GSNIR)”. To solve this problem, we propose a dual-intent enhanced graph neural network for it. Due to the fact that new items are not tied to historical sessions, the users’ intent is difficult to predict. We design a dual-intent network to learn user intent from an attention mechanism and the distribution of historical data respectively, which can simulate users’ decision-making process in interacting with a new item. To solve the challenge that new items cannot be learned by GNNs, inspired by zero-shot learning (ZSL), we infer the new item representation in GNN space by using their attributes. By outputting new item probabilities, which contain recommendation scores of the corresponding items, the new items with higher scores are recommended to users. Experiments on two representative real-world datasets show the superiority of our proposed method. The case study from the real-world verifies interpretability benefits brought by the dual-intent module and the new item reasoning module.