TH-GNN: Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Networks for LLM-Agent Shilling Attack Detection

arXiv:2608.20376v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents can now generate realistic shilling profiles, fluent reviews, and coherent ratings at scale, systematically defeating recommender-system defenses. Text-only detectors that flag semantic drift in review embeddings are blind to graph structure and temporal coordination, while graph-only detectors that exploit neighborhood anomalies cannot reason over review semantics or the cross-modal inconsistencies produced by LLM-generated content. We propose TH-GNN, a heterogeneous temporal graph neural network with a two-layer Heterogeneous Graph Transformer backbone that applies per-type and per-relation attention augmented with learnable sinusoidal temporal encodings on every edge. Cross-modal attention fuses structural user embeddings with frozen RoBERTa representations of reviews and item descriptions, while a GRU operating over log inter-arrival times captures temporal burstiness. Evaluated across five attack families and four benchmark datasets, TH-GNN achieves a grand-mean F1 score of 0.870, outperforming the strongest text-only baseline on Agent4SR attacks by 10.9 percentage points and 11.5 percentage points at the lowest injection rate. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of jointly modeling temporal, structural, and semantic signals for detecting sophisticated LLM-driven shilling attacks.

Related

• THGFM: Dual-Branch Temporal Heterogeneous Graph Fusion Model
• Detecting LLM-Generated Spam Reviews by Integrating Language Model Embeddings and Graph Neural Network
• Many Ways to Be Fake: Benchmarking Fake News Detection Under Strategy-Driven AI Generation
• Graph Neural Networks for Misinformation Detection: Performance-Efficiency Trade-offs

Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-08-24