Boosting Bot Detection via Heterophily-Aware Representation Learning and Prototype-Guided Cluster Discovery

TL;DR

This paper introduces BotHP, a novel generative graph self-supervised learning framework that enhances social media bot detection by effectively modeling heterophily and global cluster patterns, improving generalization and reducing label dependence.

Contribution

The paper proposes BotHP, a heterophily-aware, prototype-guided GSL framework with a dual-encoder architecture for improved bot detection across diverse communities.

Findings

BotHP significantly improves detection accuracy on real-world benchmarks.

It reduces reliance on labeled data and enhances model generalization.

The approach effectively captures global bot cluster patterns.

Abstract

Detecting social media bots is essential for maintaining the security and trustworthiness of social networks. While contemporary graph-based detection methods demonstrate promising results, their practical application is limited by label reliance and poor generalization capability across diverse communities. Generative Graph Self-Supervised Learning (GSL) presents a promising paradigm to overcome these limitations, yet existing approaches predominantly follow the homophily assumption and fail to capture the global patterns in the graph, which potentially diminishes their effectiveness when facing the challenges of interaction camouflage and distributed deployment in bot detection scenarios. To this end, we propose BotHP, a generative GSL framework tailored to boost graph-based bot detectors through heterophily-aware representation learning and prototype-guided cluster discovery. Specifically, BotHP leverages a dual-encoder architecture, consisting of a graph-aware encoder to capture node commonality and a graph-agnostic encoder to preserve node uniqueness. This enables the simultaneous modeling of both homophily and heterophily, effectively countering the interaction camouflage issue. Additionally, BotHP incorporates a prototype-guided cluster discovery pretext task to model the latent global consistency of bot clusters and identify spatially dispersed yet semantically aligned bot collectives. Extensive experiments on two real-world bot detection benchmarks demonstrate that BotHP consistently boosts graph-based bot detectors, improving detection performance, alleviating label reliance, and enhancing generalization capability.