KGBERT4Eth: A Feature-Complete Transformer Powered by Knowledge Graph for Multi-Task Ethereum Fraud Detection

Abstract

Ethereum's rapid ecosystem expansion and transaction anonymity have triggered a surge in malicious activity. Detection mechanisms currently bifurcate into three technical strands: expert-defined features, graph embeddings, and sequential transaction patterns, collectively spanning the complete feature sets of Ethereum's native data layer. Yet the absence of cross-paradigm integration mechanisms forces practitioners to choose between sacrificing sequential context awareness, structured fund-flow patterns, or human-curated feature insights in their solutions. To bridge this gap, we propose KGBERT4Eth, a feature-complete pre-training encoder that synergistically combines two key components: (1) a Transaction Semantic Extractor, where we train an enhanced Transaction Language Model (TLM) to learn contextual semantic representations from conceptualized transaction records, and (2) a Transaction Knowledge Graph (TKG) that incorporates expert-curated domain knowledge into graph node embeddings to capture fund flow patterns and human-curated feature insights. We jointly optimize pre-training objectives for both components to fuse these complementary features, generating feature-complete embeddings. To emphasize rare anomalous transactions, we design a biased masking prediction task for TLM to focus on statistical outliers, while the Transaction TKG employs link prediction to learn latent transaction relationships and aggregate knowledge. Furthermore, we propose a mask-invariant attention coordination module to ensure stable dynamic information exchange between TLM and TKG during pre-training. KGBERT4Eth significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both phishing account detection and de-anonymization tasks, achieving absolute F1-score improvements of 8-16% on three phishing detection benchmarks and 6-26% on four de-anonymization datasets.