Automated Batch Distillation Process Simulation for a Large Hybrid Dataset for Deep Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in batch processes is hindered by transient dynamics, scarce fault labels, and reliance on single-modality sensor data. This work introduces UTOPYA (Unified Temporal Observation for Physics-Informed Anomaly Detection and Time-Series Prediction), a 15.2M-parameter multimodal framework that jointly addresses anomaly detection, time-series prediction, and phase classification in batch distillation by fusing eight data modalities through Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) conditioned cross-modal attention and gated fusion. A physics-informed regularisation scheme introduced in this work enforces temporal smoothness and thermodynamic monotonicity, while curriculum learning introduces training samples in order of physical difficulty. On the 119-experiment multimodal batch distillation dataset of Arweiler et al. (2026), UTOPYA achieves a window-level test AUROC of 0.832 and 0.874 under multi-signal experiment-level scoring, substantially outperforming four external baselines (PCA, autoencoder, Isolation Forest, and LSTM autoencoder) evaluated under identical conditions (+0.147 window-level AUROC over the best baseline). A multimodal ablation over 15~architectural configurations shows that static context via FiLM conditioning is the key enabler, lifting experiment-level multi-signal AUROC by +0.145 over the unimodal baseline (0.729 to 0.874). Separately, a training ablation across 14 design choices reveals that several widely-adopted techniques, including instance normalisation, Mixup, ensembling, test-time augmentation, and stochastic weight averaging, fail to improve or actively degrade generalisation in this data-scarce setting. These negative results expose a fundamental tension between smoothing-based regularisation and anomaly detection, providing practical guidance for multimodal process monitoring deployment.

Industrial anomaly detection benefits from anomaly samples, yet newly deployed products typically provide only normal images, making anomaly samples difficult to collect. Zero-shot anomaly generation offers a promising solution which avoids collection of target-product anomalies. However, existing methods mainly rely on texture images or text descriptions as anomaly sources, which often produce unrealistic anomalies. Observing that similar anomalies can recur across different products, we propose anomaly transfer-based zero-shot generation, which reuses real anomalies from existing source products, making target-product anomalies no longer necessary to generate realistic anomalious samples for unseen target products. Since not every anomaly type suits the target product, an anomaly type filtering mechanism first selects plausible source types. To transfer selected anomaly, we propose DPA, a diffusion-based framework that decouples product-agnostic anomaly representations. Instead of directly extracting anomaly representations, DPA learns product-irrelevant anomaly embeddings through training with the mismatched data pair, enabling transferable anomaly concept learning across products. Furthermore, we design an adaptive mask-guided pipeline that leverages adaptive masks to control the positional and geometric plausibility of generated anomalies during generation. A training-free anomaly labeling module is further introduced to produce pixel-level annotations aligned with generated anomalies. Extensive experiments on MVTec-AD, VisA, and a dedicated anomaly-transfer benchmark demonstrate that the proposed setting and DPA generate more realistic anomalies and significantly improve downstream anomaly detection performance under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Source code and models will be released.

Industrial anomaly inspection faces a major challenge due to the lack of real-world anomaly samples. While generative models are used to create anomaly data, existing methods still struggle when handling small-scale anomalies. This failure occurs because extreme downsampling in diffusion models causes the information of small anomalies to be lost in the latent space. To address this, we introduce UniScale, a unified training and inference framework for high-fidelity industrial anomaly generation across arbitrary scales. During training, we introduce an Error-Suppressed Multi-Scale Training (EMT) strategy, which enables the model to learn the rich location-aware textures of anomalies, while suppressing upsampling-induced interpolation errors in texture acquisition, ensuring the model is capable of learning small-scale anomalies, while remaining effective for regular scale anomalies. For inference, we propose Generation-then-Fusion Denoising. It decouples anomaly generation from background integration, preventing small anomalies from being overwhelmed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art competitors in both anomaly generation quality and downstream detection performance. It achieves a relative IS(a) improvement of 45.86% (from 1.81 to 2.64) on VisA and 37.70% (from 1.22 to 1.68) on MVTec AD 2, while also improving the downstream pixel-level IoU by 4.22% on VisA and AUROC by 6.55% on MVTec AD 2. Code is available at https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/UniScale.