Conditional Diffusion Anomaly Modeling on Graphs

Chunyu Wei, Haozhe Lin, Yueguo Chen, Yunhai Wang

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Graph anomaly detection (GAD) has become a critical research area, with successful applications in financial fraud and telecommunications. Traditional Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) face significant challenges: at the topology level, they suffer from over-smoothing that averages out anomalous signals; at the feature level, discriminative models struggle when fraudulent nodes obfuscate their features to evade detection. In this paper, we propose a Conditional Graph Anomaly Diffusion Model (CGADM) that addresses these issues through the iterative refinement and denoising reconstruction properties of diffusion models. Our approach incorporates a prior-guided diffusion process that injects a pre-trained conditional anomaly estimator into both forward and reverse diffusion chains, enabling more accurate anomaly detection. For computational efficiency on large-scale graphs, we introduce a prior confidence-aware mechanism that adaptively determines the number of reverse denoising steps based on prior confidence. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CGADM achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining significant computational advantages for large-scale graph applications.