Interpretable Maximum Margin Deep Anomaly Detection

Visual anomaly detection requires adaptive representations and reliable decision boundaries, particularly when anomalous training samples are scarce and class distributions are highly imbalanced. Classical kernel-based methods yield principled geometric decision regions but typically operate on fixed features, while deep detectors learn task-specific representations but often fail to provide an explicit margin-aware kernel boundary. In this study, we propose DLM-SVDD, a deep large-margin novelty-detection framework that jointly learns convolutional features and an explicit kernel-based decision boundary. By drawing on the large-margin $\ell_p$-Support Vector Data Description ($\ell_p$-SVDD) approach, the proposed method performs explicit margin maximization and nonlinear slack penalization while adapting the representation to the target task. To train the proposed model, we present an optimization scheme that alternates between a Frank--Wolfe--based update of the convex dual boundary and a CNN update step operating on a smooth margin-violation loss induced by the recovered boundary. To improve scalability, we analyze the efficiency--accuracy trade-offs for different kernel approximation strategies, deriving practical propositions for large-scale anomaly detection. Extensive experiments on multiple standard benchmarks show consistent performance improvements over the baseline and strong overall performance compared with state-of-the-art methods while illustrating that the proposed joint representation--boundary learning scheme remains effective under severe imbalanced class distributions.

Multi-class open-set anomaly detection requires a model to characterize the normal acceptance domain formed by multiple heterogeneous subdistributions using only class-labeled samples from known normal classes, and to identify previously unseen anomalies at test time. Existing single-hypersphere methods cannot explicitly represent class-specific locations and acceptance ranges, while current multi-hypersphere or multi-class approaches do not fully integrate inter-class boundary constraints, learnable acceptance ranges, and interpretable decisions. To address these limitations, we propose Interpretable Multi-Hypersphere Deep Anomaly Detection (IMHD-AD). IMHD-AD constructs an independent hypersphere for each known normal class in a shared feature space. With target-inside and non-target-outside constraints, IMHD-AD embeds the class-specific hypersphere centers and radii directly into the final network layer and jointly optimizes them with the shared representation. The minimum signed boundary score across hyperspheres simultaneously determines open-set acceptance or rejection and provides a faithful geometric explanation of each decision. On MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10, IMHD-AD achieves the highest AUC in 28 of 30 open-set comparisons. A two-dimensional synthetic study further shows that model architecture must balance the compactness of known normal classes against the separability of unknown anomalies.

Deep Support Vector Data Description (Deep SVDD) has become a prominent framework for unsupervised anomaly detection by learning latent representations that compactly characterize normal data around a center. Despite its empirical success, anomaly decisions produced by Deep SVDD are typically made solely based on anomaly scores without rigorous statistical guarantees, thereby limiting their reliability in safety-critical and high-stakes applications where false positives must be strictly controlled. In this paper, we propose PADI (Post-Anomaly Detection Inference), a novel framework that equips a trained and frozen Deep SVDD detector with statistically valid inference by leveraging the Selective Inference framework. Specifically, PADI performs inference conditional on the event that a test instance is identified as anomalous by Deep SVDD, thereby enabling rigorous statistical assessment of anomaly decisions. Based on this formulation, we derive valid selective p-values that quantify the statistical significance of the detected anomaly. Using these p-values, we theoretically establish control of the false positive rate (FPR) at a user-specified significance level $α$ (e.g., $α=0.05$). Furthermore, we extend the proposed framework to Deep Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection (Deep SAD), providing a principled approach for statistically reliable inference in semi-supervised anomaly detection settings. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets robustly support the theoretical findings. The results demonstrate that PADI consistently achieves proper FPR control while attaining superior true positive rates compared with existing approaches.