RMGANets: reinforcement learning-enhanced multi-relational attention graph-aware network for anti-money laundering detection

Abstract

Abstract Given the anonymity and complexity of illegal transactions, traditional deep-learning methods struggle to establish correlations between transaction addresses, cash flows, and physical users. Additionally, the limited number of labels for illegal transactions results in severe class imbalance and other challenges. To overcome these limitations, we propose a reinforcement learning-enhanced, multi-relational, attention graph-aware framework to detect anti-money laundering and illegal trading activities. On the one hand, a data-driven, graph-aware layer establishes long-term dependencies and correlations between transaction graph nodes. Similarity among graph nodes divides the topological graph into three subgraphs. Learning from these subgraphs and converging nodes enriches local, global, and contextual details. Simultaneously, using repeated nodes across the subgraphs enhances interactivity between them, reduces intra-class ambiguity, and accentuates inter-class differences. On the other hand, a reinforcement learning module embedded in the graph-aware layer compensates for the missing details in node features caused by masking operations. Furthermore, the reconstructed loss function addresses significant classification inaccuracies by reducing the weight assigned to easily classified samples. Balancing these issues and individually supervising each component enables the detection framework to achieve optimal performance. The evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed model exhibits optimal detection performance and robustness, such as F1 of 93.85% and 94.39%.

Keywords

• Anti-money laundering
• Association relationships
• Long-term dependencies
• Reinforcement learning