Normality-Preserving Continual Industrial Anomaly Detection via Orthogonal LoRA Banks
Authors: Weibai Fang, Haijun Che, Feiyang Ren, Qiancheng Lao
Abstract
Continual industrial anomaly detection with diffusion models suffers from historical normality prior drift and catastrophic forgetting. Existing continual diffusion methods preserve previous knowledge through replay or constrained optimization, but they lack an explicit mechanism for isolating and protecting category-specific normality priors during sequential adaptation. Although low-rank adaptation provides modular residual updates, standard LoRA neither freezes historical normality subspaces nor prevents new adapters from interfering with previous ones. To address this issue, we propose a normality-preserving continual anomaly detection framework based on two modules: History Frozen Orthogonal LoRA Bank (HF-OLB) and Hierarchical Novelty Adaptive Bank Growth module (HNABG). HF-OLB freezes both the pre-trained U-Net backbone and the learned LoRA banks, and constrains new task-specific normality residuals to the orthogonal complement of historical LoRA subspaces. HNABG further allocates layer-dependent residual capacity and expands the bank only when the residual normality novelty exceeds the expressive capacity of existing banks. Extensive experiments on MVTec and VisA demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. On the challenging VisA 2x6 setting, our method achieves 83.6/91.8 image and pixel level A-AUROC with 3.8/3.9 FM, improving pixel level A-AUROC over the state of the art by 3.2 points while reducing pixel level FM by 1.3. These results show that our method effectively preserves historical normality priors in long horizon continual category sequences.
In industrial environments, new product categories arrive sequentially, requiring continual anomaly detection without access to past data. Normalizing Flows (NFs) provide exact density estimation but suffer from catastrophic forgetting as parameter updates across tasks distort the density manifold. While parameter isolation can prevent interference, it must preserve the strict invertibility and Jacobian validity of NFs. To satisfy these requirements, we exploit the inherent property that affine coupling layers maintain transformation validity regardless of subnet parameterization. Based on this, we propose DeCoFlow, which decomposes subnets into a frozen universal base and task-specific low-rank adapters to isolate updates. We further introduce Task-Specific Alignment, Auxiliary Coupling Layers, and Tail-Aware Loss to compensate for frozen-base rigidity. DeCoFlow achieves state-of-the-art image-level AUROCs of 98.40% on MVTec-AD and 93.00% on VisA, while maintaining parameter-level zero forgetting (0.00% FM under correct routing) with only 2.27M parameters per task.
Zero-shot anomaly detection aims to identify defects in unseen categories without target-specific training. Existing methods usually apply the same feature transformation to all samples, treating normal and anomalous data uniformly despite their fundamentally asymmetric distributions, compact normals versus diverse anomalies. We instead exploit this natural asymmetry by proposing AVA-DINO, an anomaly-aware vision-language adaptation framework with dual specialized branches for normal and anomalous patterns that adapt frozen DINOv3 visual features. During training on auxiliary data, the two branches are learned jointly with a text-guided routing mechanism and explicit routing regularization that encourages branch specialization. At test time, only the input image and fixed, predefined language descriptions are used to dynamically combine the two branches, enabling an asymmetric activation. This design prevents degenerate uniform routing and allows context-specific feature transformations. Experiments across nine industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving 93.5% image-AUROC on MVTec-AD and strong cross-domain generalization to medical imaging without domain-specific fine-tuning. https://github.com/aqeeelmirza/AVA-DINO
Recent years have witnessed growing interest in continual anomaly detection for industrial visual inspection. However, real-world manufacturing environments exhibit unpredictable shifts in data distributions, rendering task-dependent continual learning assumptions impractical. To address this limitation, we formulate industrial anomaly detection as a task-free continual learning problem and propose NC-TFAD, a neural-collapse-inspired, geometry-driven framework for learning from non-stationary data streams without task boundaries. NC-TFAD freezes a pretrained backbone and aligns streaming features to a simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF) prototype space to stabilize representation geometry under non-stationary streams. To satisfy the NC-inspired geometric construction in the absence of real anomalies, we generate synthetic anomaly samples as auxiliary anchors during training. Building on this geometry, we further introduce inter- and intra-class regularization together with a Focal Neural Collapse Contrastive (FNCC) loss to suppress representation drift and improve normal-anomaly separability. Finally, a normal-patch-prototype-guided localization branch constructs calibrated patch-wise deviation maps from normal training samples and fuses them with a weak self-attention prior, producing anomaly heatmaps without pixel-level annotations. Extensive experiments on MVTec AD and VisA show that NC-TFAD consistently outperforms representative task-free continual learning methods adapted from general vision, as well as unified anomaly detection baselines, in both image-level detection and pixel-level localization under the task-free continual learning protocol. These results highlight that geometry-driven modeling offers an effective and robust solution for task-free continual anomaly detection in real-world industrial applications.