TellTail: Fast Scoring and Detection of Dense Subgraphs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Suppose you visit an e-commerce site, and see that 50 users each reviewed almost all of the same 500 products several times each: would you get suspicious? Similarly, given a Twitter follow graph, how can we design principled measures for identifying surprisingly dense subgraphs? Dense subgraphs often indicate interesting structure, such as network attacks in network traffic graphs. However, most existing dense subgraph measures either do not model normal variation, or model it using an Erdős-Renyi assumption - but this assumption has been discredited decades ago. What is the right assumption then? We propose a novel application of extreme value theory to the dense subgraph problem, which allows us to propose measures and algorithms which evaluate the surprisingness of a subgraph probabilistically, without requiring restrictive assumptions (e.g. Erdős-Renyi). We then improve the practicality of our approach by incorporating empirical observations about dense subgraph patterns in real graphs, and by proposing a fast pruning-based search algorithm. Our approach (a) provides theoretical guarantees of consistency, (b) scales quasi-linearly, and (c) outperforms baselines in synthetic and ground truth settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".