cs.CVMar 16, 2026

GATE-AD: Graph Attention Network Encoding For Few-Shot Industrial Visual Anomaly Detection

Authors: Aggelos Psiris, Yannis Panagakis, Maria Vakalopoulou, Georgios Th. Papadopoulos

Organizations: Harokopio University of Athens, Athens, Greece · National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece · Archimedes, Athena Research Center, Athens, Greece · CentraleSupelec, University Paris Saclay, Paris, France

Abstract

Few-Shot Industrial Visual Anomaly Detection (FS-IVAD) comprises a critical task in modern manufacturing settings, where automated product inspection systems need to identify rare defects using only a handful of normal/defect-free training samples. In this context, the current study introduces a novel reconstruction-based approach termed GATE-AD. In particular, the proposed framework relies on the employment of a masked, representation-aligned Graph Attention Network (GAT) encoding scheme to learn robust appearance patterns of normal samples. By leveraging dense, patch-level, visual feature tokens as graph nodes, the model employs stacked self-attentional layers to adaptively encode complex, irregular, non-Euclidean, local relations. The graph is enhanced with a representation alignment component grounded on a learnable, latent space, where high reconstruction residual areas (i.e., defects) are assessed using a Scaled Cosine Error (SCE) objective function. Extensive comparative evaluation on the MVTec AD, VisA, and MPDD industrial defect detection benchmarks demonstrates that GATE-AD achieves state-of-the-art performance across the 11- to 88-shot settings, combining the highest detection accuracy (increase up to 1.8%1.8\% in image AUROC in the 8-shot case in MPDD) with the lowest per-image inference latency (at least 25.05%25.05\% faster), compared to the best-performing literature methods. In order to facilitate reproducibility and further research, the source code of GATE-AD is available at https://github.com/gthpapadopoulos/GATE-AD.

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