Detecting Illicit Food Factories from Chemical Declaration Data via Graph-aware Self-supervised Contrastive Anomaly Ranking

In the global food industry, where the line between legitimate and illicit manufacturing is increasingly blurred by the scale and complexity of the supply chain, safeguarding consumer health and trust necessitates innovative detection methods. Addressing this, this paper presents Graph-aware Self-supervised Contrastive Anomaly Ranking (GraphCAR), a novel unsupervised learning model, devised to identify illicit food factories through the scrutiny of chemical declaration data. GraphCAR tackles the scarcity of labeled data and the intricacies inherent in the vast array of declared chemicals, leveraging a Graph Autoencoder fused with a self-supervised contrastive learning mechanism. This fusion not only simplifies the feature space by embedding chemical declarations within a bipartite graph but also adeptly flags subtle, potentially illicit patterns through contrastively inspecting the learned factory representations. Through rigorous evaluations conducted on real-world factory's chemical declaration data, GraphCAR has demonstrated superior performance over conventional methods on unsupervised outlier detection and one-class classification tasks, showcasing its accuracy, robustness and reliability in flagging potential malpractice. With its successful application in food safety, GraphCAR stands as a testament to the potential of AI-driven solutions to address multifaceted challenges for the greater good.