cs.CVAug 2, 2026

Understanding and Overcoming Cross-modal Fusion Bias in Multimodal Anomaly Detection From A Fisher Information Perspective

Authors: Kaifang LongLianbo MaLiming LiuGuoyang Xie

Abstract

Current advancements in Multimodal Anomaly Detection (MAD) are largely driven by enhancing multimodal fusion, particularly through the integration of RGB and Depth data for richer anomaly representation. However, less attention was devoted to analyzing the role of cross-modal fusion bias, a well-known challenge in multimodal learning, in MAD. This gap motivates a key question: can we overcome this bias to break the performance bottleneck of current work? In this paper, we first analyze the impact of cross-modal fusion bias in MAD via the Fisher Information Matrix. Then, grounded in these findings, we propose UCFB, a simple yet effective plug-and-play framework designed to mitigate cross-modal fusion bias in MAD. It achieves this by jointly employing Fisher-information-guided dynamic calibration to adjust modality-specific regularization weights and canonical similarity analysis to improve inter-modal interactions. Extensive experiments on the MVTec 3D-AD and Eyecandies datasets demonstrate that UCFB achieves consistent improvements in single-class, multi-class, and few-shot settings.

Explore similar work

Jul 13, 2026cs.CV

TC-MAF: Train-Calibrated Bounded Multi-Evidence Fusion for Multimodal Industrial Anomaly Detection

Multimodal anomaly detection benefits from complementary RGB and 3D evidence, yet auxiliary RGB reconstruction is not equally reliable across product categories and class-wise test-time policy selection is usually unavailable. We propose TC-MAF, a base-anchored multi-evidence fusion design that combines a multimodal detector, complementary Dinomaly evidence, and a small cross-modal consistency cue under one fixed pixel-level fusion formula. A lightweight training-dispersion confidence (TDC) term scales auxiliary participation using only normal training statistics. On MVTec-3D, TC-MAF reaches 0.979 image-level AUROC and 0.990 pixel-level AUPRO, achieving the best mean results on both detection and localization among the compared multimodal methods. Systematic ablations show that the fusion structure itself is the dominant factor, while TDC provides a smaller but reproducible calibration gain over no calibration or arbitrary calibration. Additional experiments show that the same design remains effective under a pooled-statistics variant, auxiliary-branch and backbone substitutions, few-shot settings, a missing-3D setting, and cross-dataset evaluation on Eyecandies. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TC_MAF-C3BB.
Ming Deng, Sijin Sun, Xiaochuan Hu +1
Jun 18, 2026cs.CV

CMDS-AD: Cross-Modal Dual-Stream Decoupling for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

Few-shot anomaly detection remains challenging due to limited training data. Multi-modal anomaly detection (MAD) offers a viable solution, leveraging 3D geometric cues to enrich 2D RGB representations and compensate for this scarcity. However, existing MAD methods apply spatially uniform feature processing, conflating stable macroscopic structures with high-frequency localized defect signals, exacerbating cross-modal misalignment and inflating false-positive rates. To overcome this, we present CMDS-AD, a Cross-Modal Dual-Stream Anomaly Detection framework. A LoRA-guided diffusion model generates diverse RGB samples to mitigate extreme data scarcity. For 3D normal augmentation, we employ a pre-trained diffusion model as a normal estimator. Crucially, this estimator inherently acts as a non-linear low-pass filter, directly extracting low-frequency normal representations from RGB inputs. This establishes an auxiliary estimated stream of purely low-frequency information, anchoring robust structural templates and assisting the uncompressed real stream, containing coupled high- and low-frequency components, to precisely isolate micro-defects. A Coordinate-Aware Hierarchical Feature Mapper adaptively aligns cross-modal semantics, while a multiplicative scoring mechanism filters modality-specific noise. Under the extreme 1-shot setting, CMDS-AD achieves absolute performance gains of 5.7% (I-AUROC) and 2.0% (AUPRO) on MVTec 3D-AD, alongside 7.7% and 5.6% improvements on EyeCandies, establishing a new state-of-the-art. Code is available at https://github.com/Junhaocai27/CMDS-AD
Junhao Cai, Junyu Chen, Deyu Zeng +4
May 28, 2026cs.CV

Uni-RCM: Unified Reference-guided Cross-modal Mapping for Multi-Class Anomaly Detection

Multi-modal industrial anomaly detection typically relies on separate models for each product category, fundamentally limiting practical scalability. When shifting to a unified paradigm that handles diverse classes simultaneously, detection accuracy often degrades due to inter-class interference and feature manifold confusion. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Unified Reference guided Cross-modal Mapping framework, named Uni-RCM. At its core, we propose a reference guide block to dynamically filter out category-specific noise by introducing a learnable reference feature, which captures the commonalities across different modalities. Besides, an offline residual quantizer is proposed to characterize the normal distribution by multiple cascaded codebooks. Extensive evaluations on the MVTec-3D AD dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance in the challenging multi-class setting and in terms of image-level detection and pixel-level localization.
Yangchen Wu, Huiqiang Xie