Collaborative Streaming Anomaly Detection with Interactive Explanations and Ensemble Consensus

In this paper, we propose ReactVAU, a Slow-Fast Decoupled Framework for real-time streaming Video Anomaly Understanding (VAU). Existing VAU methods rely on offline inference with global temporal sampling, which violates causality and prevents deployment in live surveillance streams. Conversely, general streaming video models satisfy causal access but dilute rare transient anomalies during memory compression and often invoke heavyweight MLLMs uniformly over long normal intervals. React VAU addresses this gap with three synergistic components: a lightweight Fast Detection Module based on Spatial Grid Folding (SGF) for continuous anomaly filtering; an Anomaly-Aware Persistent Memory (AAPM) that protects critical visual cues from temporal decay; and a heavyweight Slow Reasoning Module that remains dormant during normal streams and is awakened only by suspicious events for semantic verification and causal description. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that ReactVAU operates under strict streaming constraints while simultaneously achieving competitive performance in both anomaly detection and causal reasoning, alongside significantly enhanced computational efficiency by minimizing heavyweight MLLM invocations. Project page is available at https://huiyuiui.github.io/ReactVAU/

Automated anomaly detection methods often report strong performance on curated academic benchmarks, but their behavior under real-world industrial conditions is less clear. In this work, we evaluate 19 unsupervised anomaly detection models on the BowTie dataset, a challenging manufacturing dataset with reflective surfaces, subtle defects, and profile-specific variation. In contrast to benchmark results, we observe that model performance is less stable than typically reported on standard benchmarks such as MVTec AD, highly sensitive to preprocessing, and inconsistent across conditions, with no single approach emerging as uniformly robust; a consensus audit further indicates that nominal-data quality affects deployment. Motivated by these findings, we developed and initially deployed a unified human-in-the-loop framework for manufactured-part inspection that combines image annotation, AI-assisted defect detection, and an integrated validation engine, replacing a prior manual visual inspection and documentation workflow. The system supports heatmap-guided defect review, SAM-refined candidate regions for inspector acceptance, rejection, or boundary adjustment, mask evaluation where annotations exist, and review history for inspector consistency and onboarding. Together, the results highlight the gap between benchmark performance and deployment reality, and provide a practical framework for addressing it.

Large language model (LLM) agents have shown promise in automating complex data-analysis workflows, but their reliable deployment remains challenging in high-stakes industrial scenarios. Industrial anomaly detection (IAD) is essential for manufacturing quality, safety, and efficiency, yet existing LLM-based IAD agents mainly focus on execution while under-exploiting strategy formulation. Consequently, they struggle to handle heterogeneous modalities in a unified and cost-effective manner. Inspired by the DMAIC quality-management framework, we propose DMAIC-IAD (DMAIC-inspired Agentic Industrial Anomaly Detection), a "Plan First, Judge Later" multi-agent system that aligns LLM agents with structured industrial problem-solving. DMAIC-IAD distills heterogeneous references into standardized operating procedures (SOPs) before strategy generation, and introduces a pre-trained execution-free judge model to rank candidate strategies without costly runtime trials. Extensive experiments across four modalities show that DMAIC-IAD improves average detection performance over applicable agentic baselines by 37.76%.