HyperGOOD: Towards Out-of-Distribution Detection in Hypergraphs

Abstract Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection plays a critical role in ensuring the robustness of machine learning models in open-world settings. While extensive efforts have been made in vision, language, and graph domains, the challenge of OOD detection in hypergraph-structured data remains unexplored. In this work, we formalize the problem of hypergraph out-of-distribution (HOOD) detection, which aims to identify nodes or hyperedges whose high-order relational contexts differ significantly from those seen during training. We propose HyperGOOD, a unified energy-based detection framework that integrates multi-scale spectral decomposition with structure-aware uncertainty propagation. By preserving both low- and high-frequency signals and diffusing uncertainty across the hypergraph, HyperGOOD effectively captures subtle and relationally entangled anomalies. Experimental results on nine hypergraph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, establishing a new foundation for robust hypergraph learning under distributional shifts.