Rethinking Generalization in Graphs: A Hierarchical Interaction Perspective for Generalist Detection

Abstract

With the increasing heterogeneity of social networks and online interaction systems, generalist graph anomaly detection (GAD) has become essential for identifying abnormal and fraudulent behaviors in complex environments. However, most existing GAD approaches rely heavily on domain-specific semantic alignment, which substantially restricts their ability to learn transferable node representations and often leads to poor generalization on unseen graph domains. To address this challenge, we propose HIerarchical Interaction MOdeling for zero-shot generalist GAD (termed HIMO-GAD). HIMO-GAD enables anomaly detection across diverse graph domains without retraining or access to target-domain supervision by modeling the evolutionary trajectories of node representations across hierarchical structural depths, thereby capturing interaction patterns that exhibit strong cross-domain stability. Specifically, HIMO-GAD integrates two core components: (1) a Dynamic Interaction Modeling Module that characterizes cross-layer interaction evolution to extract transferable representations, and (2) an Anomaly-Aware Regulation Mechanism that combines gradient immunity and centralization regularization to suppress overfitting and stabilize cross-domain generalization. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world graph datasets demonstrate that HIMO-GAD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in strict zero-shot settings, achieving up to a 10% improvement in key evaluation metrics and exhibiting strong generalization across heterogeneous graph domains.