Unsupervised tabular anomaly detection methods typically learn feature patterns from normal samples during training and subsequently identify samples that deviate from these patterns as anomalies during testing. However, in practical scenarios, the limited scale and diversity of training data often lead to an incomplete characterization of normal patterns. While test-time adaptation offers a remedy, its isolated focus on test-time optimization ignores the critical synergy with training-phase learning. Furthermore, indiscriminate adaptation to unlabeled test data inevitably triggers anomaly contamination, preventing the model from fully realizing its discriminative capability between normal and anomalous samples. To address these issues, we propose RTTAD, a Risk-aware Test-time adaptation method for unsupervised Tabular Anomaly Detection. RTTAD holistically tackles normality shifts via a synergistic two-stage mechanism. During training, collaborative dual-task learning captures multi-level representations to establish a robust normal prior. During testing, a Test-Time Contrastive Learning (TTCL) module explicitly accounts for adaptation risk by selectively updating the model using high-confidence pseudo-normal samples while constraining anomalous ones. Additionally, TTCL incorporates a k-nearest neighbor-based contrastive objective to refine embedding distributions, thereby further enhancing the model's discriminative capacity. Extensive experiments on 15 tabular datasets demonstrate that RTTAD achieves state-of-the-art overall detection performance.
Identifying anomalous instances in tabular data is essential for improving data reliability and maintaining system stability. Due to the scarcity of ground-truth anomaly labels, existing methods mainly rely on unsupervised anomaly detection models, or exploit a small number of labeled anomalies to facilitate detection via sample generation or contrastive learning. However, unsupervised methods lack sufficient anomaly awareness, while current generation and contrastive approaches tend to compute anomalies globally, overlooking the localized anomaly patterns of tabular features, resulting in suboptimal detection performance. To address these limitations, we propose PLAG, a pseudo-label-guided anomaly generation method designed to enhance tabular anomaly detection. Specifically, by utilizing pseudo-anomalies as guidance signals and decoupling the overall anomaly quantification of a sample into an accumulation of feature-level abnormalities, PLAG not only effectively obviates the need for scarce ground-truth labels but also provides a novel perspective for the model to comprehend localized anomalous signals at a fine-grained level. Furthermore, a two-stage data selection strategy is proposed, integrating format verification and uncertainty estimation to rigorously filter candidate samples, thereby ensuring the fidelity and diversity of the synthetic anomalies. Ultimately, these filtered synthetic anomalies serve as robust discriminative guidance, empowering the model to better separate normal and anomalous instances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PLAG achieves state-of-the-art performance against eight representative baselines. Moreover, as a flexible framework, it integrates seamlessly with existing unsupervised detectors, consistently boosting F1-scores by 0.08 to 0.21.
Unsupervised tabular anomaly detection is a critical task with applications spanning offensive language detection, network security, and quality control. Despite extensive research, existing unsupervised anomaly detection methods still face fundamental challenges including conflicting distributional assumptions, computational inefficiency, and difficulty handling different anomaly types. To address these problems, we propose ISER (Isolation-based Spherical Ensemble Representations) that extends existing isolation-based methods by using hypersphere radii as a monotonic transformation of local density characteristics while maintaining linear time and constant space complexity w.r.t. the dataset size. ISER constructs ensemble representations where hypersphere radii encode local sparsity through a monotonic transformation of density: smaller radii correspond to dense regions while larger radii correspond to sparse regions. We introduce a novel similarity-based scoring method that measures pattern consistency by comparing ensemble representations against a theoretical anomaly reference pattern. Additionally, we enhance the performance of Isolation Forest by using ISER and adapting the scoring function to address axis-parallel bias and local anomaly detection limitations. Comprehensive experiments on 20 real-world datasets demonstrate ISER's competitive performance over 12 SOTA methods.
Unsupervised tabular anomaly detection requires methods that are accurate, robust across heterogeneous datasets, and computationally efficient. Classical statistical detectors are often efficient, but they usually rely on a fixed data view and a single notion of abnormality. Deep anomaly detectors can learn more flexible scoring functions, but they are substantially slower and difficult to tune in unsupervised settings due to the lack of a reliable supervisory signal. We propose RGLD, a randomized global-local density estimator for efficient unsupervised tabular anomaly detection. RGLD combines a global random-feature density branch, which identifies samples in broadly low-density regions, with a local neighbor branch, which detects samples that are weakly supported by nearby observations. Both branches operate over feature-bagged randomized views, allowing RGLD to expose anomaly evidence that may be hidden in any single representation. We conduct experiments on 47 tabular datasets against 23 statistical and deep anomaly detection baselines under fully unsupervised setting. RGLD achieves the strongest dataset-level AUROC performance, ranking 1st in dataset wins, and ranks 2nd in AUPRC wins. RGLD is also faster than all evaluated deep detectors, achieving 50x-580x speedups, and remains competitive with statistical methods in runtime, yielding a favorable accuracy-efficiency tradeoff.