cs.LGJun 15, 2026

Neural Bayesian Anomaly Mitigation: A Robust Loss that Doubles as an Unsupervised Contamination Classifier

Authors: S. A. K. LeeneyW. J. HandleyH. T. J. BevinsE. de Lera Acedo

Organizations: Astrophysics Group, Cavendish Laboratory University of Cambridge · Institute of Astronomy University of Cambridge

Abstract

Engineered robust losses such as Huber, Student-tt, and generalised cross-entropy make supervised models tolerant of contamination but cannot answer which observations are corrupted. We introduce Neural Bayesian Anomaly Mitigation (NBAM), a general-purpose drop-in loss derived from a Bayesian latent-switch mixture model: the marginal likelihood defines a robust supervised loss, and the associated posterior defines an unsupervised contamination classifier. Like Huber or Student-tt, NBAM can replace the standard training loss in any supervised pipeline; unlike them, it additionally learns a structured contamination model and returns a calibrated per-sample contamination posterior. A learned input-dependent prior πφ(x)π_φ(x) captures the spatial locality of contamination, so that samples near known corruptions are more likely to be flagged, while an Occam penalty emerges automatically and regularises against over-flagging. On CIFAR-10 with asymmetric label contamination, NBAM recovers the structure of the corruption process without supervision: the contamination posterior separates clean from corrupted samples, and the learned anomaly head identifies the direction of every label-flip pair. Alongside these capabilities, NBAM outperforms the four robust-loss baselines considered here at contamination rates 0.2-0.6.

Explore similar work

May 8, 2026cs.LG

Disagreement-Regularized Importance Sampling for Adversarial Label Corruption

Standard Importance Sampling (IS) collapses under label corruption because high-norm examples, prioritized for variance reduction, are often adversarial outliers. We formalize this misalignment using an ε\varepsilon-contamination model and propose Disagreement-Regularized Importance Sampling (DR-IS), a sub-sampling method based on loss rank-disagreement across independent proxy ensemble. We prove finite-sample concentration bounds showing that the empirical rank disagreement of bulk corrupted examples is bounded above, and that of boundary-clean examples bounded below, both at rate O(log(N/δ)/K)O(\sqrt{\log(N/δ)/K}) with probability 1δ1-δ; when the structural expectation gap ΔΔ' between the two groups is positive and the boundary-clean set is at least as large as the selected subset, these bounds certify strict separation and control the contamination rate of the selected subset. Empirically, DR-IS remains robust under targeted high-norm attacks that break magnitude-based methods such as the Error L2L_2-norm (EL2N) on benchmark datasets. DR-IS complements training-dynamics approaches like Area Under the Margin ranking (AUM), offering improved robustness in the loss-aligned regime alongside explicit finite-sample concentration certificates and a contamination bound limiting noise leakage from the statistical tail of corrupted points.
Csongor Horváth, Ida-Maria Sintorn, Prashant Singh
Jun 11, 2026cs.LG

Distributional Loss for Robust Classification

This paper proposes a novel loss concept for supervised classification tasks. Rather than enforcing a direct mapping from each input sample to a single assigned label, we define an optimization objective over all classifier outputs as a bimodal Gaussian distribution. This softer target formulation implicitly captures class ambiguity, mitigates overfitting, and encourages the learning of more robust decision boundaries, all without requiring additional label information. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in robustness, with particularly pronounced gains in low-data regimes, while requiring only minimal modifications to standard training pipelines.
Kathleen Anderson, Thomas Martinetz
Aug 13, 2026stat.ML

Wasserstein Filtering: A Sample Selection Method for Robust Distribution Learning

Given a dataset where a portion of the samples are contaminated, our goal is to recover the underlying clean population distribution. To this end, we propose Wasserstein Filtering (WF), a novel sample selection framework that discards a fraction of suspicious samples and estimates the target distribution using the empirical measure of the remaining data. The core insight is to select a subset of samples whose empirical distribution maximizes its Wasserstein distance to the fully contaminated empirical distribution, thereby preferentially isolating and removing geometrically influential outliers. To render this optimization computationally tractable, we introduce three algorithms: a marginal screening scheme, SinkMarg, and two joint optimization algorithms, SinkWF and SlicedWF, leveraging entropic optimal transport and sliced Wasserstein approximations, respectively. On the theoretical front, we introduce the Far Exclusion and Local Projection (FELP) contamination model, which characterizes corruptions consisting of well-separated outliers and locally indistinguishable perturbations. Under this model, we prove that the WF estimator achieves minimax optimality over distribution families with bounded covariance. Extensive numerical experiments on synthetic datasets, benchmark anomaly detection suites, and robust generative learning with diffusion models demonstrate that WF serves as a highly practical, model-agnostic preprocessing tool. It delivers competitive outlier detection performance and provides substantial downstream benefits for generative modeling under heavy contamination.
Yikai Xu, Zhao Chen, Jian Huang