Improving Anomaly Detection with Foundation-Model Synthesis and Wavelet-Domain Attention

Industrial anomaly detection (AD) is characterized by an abundance of normal images but a scarcity of anomalous ones. Although numerous few-shot anomaly synthesis methods have been proposed to augment anomalous data for downstream AD tasks, most existing approaches require time-consuming training and struggle to learn distributions that are faithful to real anomalies, thereby restricting the efficacy of AD models trained on such data. To address these limitations, we propose a training-free few-shot anomaly generation method, namely O2MAG, which leverages the self-attention in One reference anomalous image to synthesize More realistic anomalies, supporting effective downstream anomaly detection. Specifically, O2MAG manipulates three parallel diffusion processes via self-attention grafting and incorporates the anomaly mask to mitigate foreground-background query confusion, synthesizing text-guided anomalies that closely adhere to real anomalous distributions. To bridge the semantic gap between the encoded anomaly text prompts and the true anomaly semantics, Anomaly-Guided Optimization is further introduced to align the synthesis process with the target anomalous distribution, steering the generation toward realistic and text-consistent anomalies. Moreover, to mitigate faint anomaly synthesis inside anomaly masks, Dual-Attention Enhancement is adopted during generation to reinforce both self- and cross-attention on masked regions. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of O2MAG, demonstrating its superior performance over prior state-of-the-art methods on downstream AD tasks.

Time series anomaly detection is a crucial task in various domains, including finance, healthcare, and industry. However, existing methods often struggle to generalize across different datasets, especially when anomalies are subtle or context-dependent. To solve this issue, we introduce ChronosAD, a novel architecture for anomaly detection that uses a time series foundation model as a feature extractor. Specifically, it employs a two-stage pipeline: first, it uses the foundation model to extract embeddings for each time series in a zero-shot manner. Then, a custom-developed Temporal Block, composed of Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) and Multi-Head Attention, refines these embeddings to capture temporal dependencies and highlight salient patterns. Unlike previous approaches, our model requires minimal task-specific tuning and demonstrates robust generalization across a wide range of domains, including industrial, medical, cyber-physical, and automotive systems. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmarks show that ChronosAD outperforms existing methods by 4.72% in AUC and 6.60% in AP on average. The source code is available at https://github.com/intelligolabs/ChronosAD.

Industrial anomaly detection (AD) is bottlenecked by the scarcity of anomalous samples, making high-fidelity anomaly synthesis crucial for improving downstream performance. However, existing methods either rely on scarce real anomaly references or auxiliary data, while lacking complex reasoning and iterative optimization capabilities for generating realistic defects in open-set scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose CORE, a cost-efficient and training-free prompt optimization framework based on Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), which unifies zero-shot and one-shot anomaly synthesis. CORE first introduces an Anomaly Context Grounding module to transform sparse user context into defect-aware generation context, which is subsequently instantiated as structured anomaly prompts that disentangle normal-region preservation from anomaly-specific variation, enabling controllable and faithful defect generation. Furthermore, CORE autonomously refines prompts through a self-supervised contrast-and-reflect mechanism. This design empowers general-purpose LMMs to synthesize realistic anomalies under both zero-shot and one-shot settings without task-specific training. Extensive experiments on MVTec-AD and VisA demonstrate that CORE synthesizes realistic and diverse anomalies, yielding superior improvements in downstream AD performance. Furthermore, its model-agnostic and plug-and-play paradigm enables effortless integration with diverse LMMs, facilitating adaptation to unseen open-set scenarios.