cs.SDOct 22, 2026

HARMONY: Hierarchical Anchor Retrieval on Manifold for Oblivious-source Machinery Acoustic Anomaly Detection

Authors: Yuhang Zhang, Yang Li, Qiang Wu, Mingyuan Li

Organizations: School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University, Beijing, China · Independent Researcher · Collaborative Innovation Center for Western Ecological Safety, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China · ELLIS Institute of Finland · 

Abstract

In standard acoustic anomaly detection (ASD), models are usually trained separately for each machine or domain using explicit metadata. However, in realistic deployments, machine identifiers are incomplete, unreliable, or simply unavailable. Thus, metadata-free machinery ASD asks a single model to monitor mixed machine populations without machine IDs. In this paper, we argue that the main failure mode is not a weak detector family, but representation entanglement. The heterogeneous normal modes overlap in frozen pre-trained feature spaces, making anomaly scoring and approximate retrieval unreliable. We study this problem directly and propose HARMONY (Hierarchical Anchor Retrieval on Manifold for Oblivious-source acoustic aNomalY detection), an anchor-guided geometric repartitioning framework that reorganizes mixed-source features into compact Voronoi regions and reuses this structure for hierarchical retrieval. On DCASE 2020, HARMONY improves mean AUC from 75.40% to 90.00% (14.60 percentage points) over the strongest unified baseline and from 83.90% to 90.00% over a strong foundation-feature baseline. On a single CPU, its hierarchical retrieval achieves a 7.8x speedup over exhaustive search with only a 0.20 percentage-point AUC drop. These results suggest that incorporating explicit geometric partitioning can improve both detection accuracy and retrieval efficiency for ASD. Code is available at https://github.com/Zzyh0208/HARMONY.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables31 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. How Much Does Machine Identity Matter in Anomalous Sound Detection at Test Time?

    Feb 18, 2026Kevin Wilkinghoff, Keisuke Imoto, Zheng-Hua TanAnomaly DetectionIndustrial Anomaly Detection

  2. UD-ASD: A Unified Diffusion Model for Anomalous Sound Detection

    Jul 14, 2026Pengxiang Gao, Yu Qiu, Yanzhi SongAudio Diffusion ModelsFault Detection

  3. Sub-Band Spectral Matching with Localized Score Aggregation for Robust Anomalous Sound Detection

    Mar 14, 2026Phurich Saengthong, Takahiro ShinozakiAnomaly DetectionUnsupervised Anomaly Detection