Beyond Single Transactions: D-EMAML---Dual-Edge Motif Neural Networks for Enhanced Anti-Money Laundering Detection

Abstract Anti-money laundering (AML) detection is of vital importance in financial risk control. Although Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have yielded promising results, existing motif-based approaches primarily focus on node anomaly detection on simple graphs, which hinders the direct identification of anomalous edges in directed temporal transaction networks. Moreover, consecutive transaction relationships, termed dual-edge motifs, have rarely been considered in previous AML studies. To address these gaps, we propose the D-EMAML framework, which consists of: (1) Fast-Motif-Gen, a GPU-accelerated dual-edge motif graph generator with pruning; (2) D-EMGNN, an attention-enhanced heterogeneous GNN module that reduces motif-type information redundancy; (3) MELP, a label aggregation scheme projecting predictions from the motif graph to the original graph. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate significant improvements over representative baselines and validate the contribution of each component. To our knowledge, this is the first application of dual-edge motif graphs for GNN-based edge anomaly detection in AML.