Anomaly Detection

Latest papers 409

Aug 5, 2026cs.LG

Why Ranking Anomaly Detection Algorithms Isn't as Reliable as You May Think

Anomaly detection is a safety-critical machine learning problem with applications ranging from fraud detection to network intrusion prevention and industrial monitoring. Despite the large number of proposed anomaly detection algorithms, many novel methods claim state-of-the-art performance. However, many authors do so under benchmark settings that are not aligned with one another. This lack of comparability raises concerns regarding the reproducibility and reliability of anomaly detection benchmarks. In this work, we study the impact of common benchmarking choices on the stability of algorithm rankings. Using seven representative anomaly detection algorithms and 690 datasets from the OddBench benchmark suite, we analyze how rankings change under varying dataset selections, evaluation metrics, hyperparameter configurations, and random seeds. To quantify this effect, we introduce a rank instability metric measuring the variability of algorithm rankings across benchmark settings. Our results show that algorithm rankings in anomaly detection are highly unstable. In many cases, almost every competitive algorithm can appear as the best-performing method under some benchmark configuration. Among the studied factors, dataset selection and hyperparameter choice contribute most strongly to ranking uncertainty, while random seeds and evaluation metrics have a comparatively limited impact. We also observe that reliable benchmarking requires substantially larger and more diverse dataset collections than the ones commonly used in prior work.
Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

PADFormer: Pose-agnostic Anomaly Detection from Sparse View Images

Pose-agnostic Anomaly Detection (PAD) remains challenging as anomalies can appear under arbitrary viewpoints, requiring methods to handle significant pose variations. Existing approaches rely on complex 3D reconstruction, which are computationally expensive and require extensive multi-view data. We propose PADFormer, a novel image-space approach that leverages Vision Transformer (ViT) to directly reconstruct anomaly-free versions of query images while preserving pose information. Our key insight is to adapt cross-view masked reconstruction for anomaly detection through training exclusively on normal data, combined with dynamic patch selection and spatial alignment mechanisms that enable effective learning from sparse reference views under significant pose variations. During inference, we perform multiple forward passes with different masking patterns to generate an ensemble of anomaly-free reconstructions, ensuring comprehensive coverage of the query image. Anomalies are detected by comparing these reconstructions with the query image. PADFormer achieves state-of-the-art results on the PAD benchmark while maintaining comparable performance on classic few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) tasks, demonstrating superior efficiency and generalization without requiring 3D reconstruction.
Aug 4, 2026cs.LG

An Explainable LLM Agent Layer for Open-World Anomaly Detection in Oil Wells

Open-World Learning (OWL) pipelines for oil well anomaly detection have recently been shown to combine autoencoder-based detection, multiclass classification, and Mahalanobis-based novelty detection on the public 3W dataset. These pipelines answer \textit{what happened}, but they do not explain \textit{why the model believes it} or \textit{what the operator should do next}, and they do not put a human-readable name on the novelty clusters they discover. This paper evaluates a Large Language Model (LLM) agent layer placed downstream of the OWL pipeline, designed as a \textbf{companion} to the published upstream methods rather than a replacement. Using the Qwen3.5-397B-A17B Mixture-of-Experts model served via NVIDIA NIM, the agent receives structured sensor metrics and upstream classification or novelty assertions, and returns natural-language justifications, confidence-ranked critiques, and consolidated names for detected novelties. Across three studies spanning 989 real well-file segments from the 3W dataset, the agent achieved 35.1%35.1\% top-1 / 63.9%63.9\% top-3 (95% CI [56.9, 70.4]) classification on all nine classes, 71.7%71.7\% top-2 validation [64.8, 77.6] with precision 0.910.91 [0.84, 0.95] across 7 probed classes, and 89.7%89.7\% novelty detection [87.0, 91.9] with stable cluster naming on 5 of 7 hidden classes. The agent is not a standalone classifier. Its role is to: (1) confirm upstream decisions when sensor evidence supports them, (2) justify decisions in sensor-grounded language operators can audit, (3) flag disagreement when upstream labels are implausible, and (4) name novelties so that clustered unlabeled events arrive at the engineer with a consolidated human-readable label. The goal is to close the explainability gap that currently blocks deployment of OWL pipelines in operational settings.
Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

Material-Segmented Per-Pixel Emissivity Correction for Thermographic Anomaly Detection in Cultural Heritage Digital Twins

Quantitative longwave thermography of heritage surfaces is limited by the global-constant emissivity assumption in inverse-Planck temperature retrieval; on heterogeneous surfaces emissivity varies within one field of view, producing apparent-temperature artifacts that mimic and mask subsurface anomalies. We present a training-free pipeline that derives per-pixel emissivity by applying SAM 3.1 open-vocabulary segmentation to a colocated, co-calibrated RGB channel, mapping segments to a material-keyed LWIR emissivity table compiled from primary measurement literature, and propagating the field into a per-pixel inverse-Planck solve on raw radiometric data. Lacking any public dataset with raw radiometry, a temperature reference, and a colocated RGB camera, we evaluate on a physics-based synthetic benchmark and four real datasets. On the benchmark, under a palette spanning the low-emissivity exceptions, the correction cuts mean absolute error from 1.97 K to 0.91 K at 20 K contrast and, with an accurate table, beats the best fitted global constant on every layout; on a heritage-realistic emissivity distribution it does not. We contribute a quantified operating-regime map, and a measurement-backed finding that tempers the heritage claim: weathered outdoor heritage emissivities cluster near the conventional default, so the correction is small on typical surfaces and concentrated on genuine low-emissivity exceptions. We characterize the dominant failure mode, in which open-vocabulary segmentation matches appearance rather than material, and the contraindicated regime in which emissivity-defined anomalies are suppressed.
Aug 3, 2026cs.LG

Evaluation Blindness: How Silent Measurement Failures Corrupt AI Systems from Training to Deployment

AI systems can fail silently. The failure propagates through training loops, evaluation pipelines, and production monitoring stacks until downstream harm makes it visible. This paper introduces evaluation blindness: a measurement function M exhibits evaluation blindness with respect to failure class F when it produces readings indistinguishable from a healthy state while the system is actually failing, with no auxiliary signal flagging the gap. The problem surfaces at two lifecycle stages the literature has treated separately. At training time, reward models are gamed, importance-sampling corrections are silently miscalculated, and benchmark contamination inflates fine-tuning evaluations, all while loss curves look healthy and gradient updates proceed normally. At deployment time, monitoring fails to catch six classes of production failure, including an Operational category that is 100% silent by structural definition. We provide a formal detectability predicate unifying both stages. Four training-time case studies trace concrete breakdowns, including a real implementation bug in TRL PR #6594 where gradients are corrupted as loss decreases normally. A six-class taxonomy validated against 50 real-world incidents from court documents and regulatory filings finds that 53% of verifiable public failures were silent. A failure budget framework ties acceptable failure rates to use-case risk class. The implication is direct: measurement infrastructure is a correctness concern across the full AI lifecycle, not just at evaluation time. Data, code, and taxonomy schema are at https://github.com/priyanka25aug/llm-failure-taxonomy.
Aug 3, 2026cs.LG

ReFP-AD: Rectified Flow Preconditioning for Energy-Based Anomaly Detection

Unified anomaly detection requires modeling highly heterogeneous normal data without access to anomalous samples. While foundation models like DINOv2 provide rich token representations, leveraging these spaces for explicit density estimation remains challenging. Energy-Based Models (EBMs) offer a principled formulation, but their training in high-dimensional token spaces is unstable due to anisotropy and strong cross-dimensional correlations, which degrades finite-step Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. We identify this instability as fundamentally geometric and introduce ReFP-AD (Rectified Flow Preconditioning for Anomaly Detection), which learns a geometric reparameterization that maps high-dimensional embeddings into a well-conditioned latent space via an optimal transport (OT)-coupled rectified flow. This preconditioning enables stable persistent contrastive divergence with preconditioned Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) in full-dimensional token spaces. Anomaly scores are then derived from the learned energy landscape using gradient norms. Under a strict unified protocol on the MVTec-AD and VisA datasets, ReFP-AD achieves 98.6%/97.9% Image/Pixel AUROC on MVTec-AD and 97.3%/99.0% on VisA, outperforming prior unified EBM baselines by up to +10.8% in Image AUROC. Ablation experiments demonstrate that geometric reparameterization is critical for finite-step MCMC and accurate anomaly localization in high-dimensional token spaces. Code is available at https://github.com/CLendering/ReFP-AD
Aug 1, 2026cs.AI

Behavioral Grammar: Detecting Adaptive Malware via Tiny Language Model Priors and Second-Order Temporal Analysis

Modern endpoint detection systems face a fundamental tension: signature-based approaches are trivially evaded by polymorphic or adaptive threats, while heavy deep-learning models resist auditability and deployment at scale. This paper presents Behavioral Grammar, a detection architecture that treats host runtime behavior as a structured language and learns its grammar with a compact 0.88M-parameter causal Transformer (TinyGPT). Each system event is discretized into an 8-token representation spanning event type, process, argument skeleton, path category, parent process, user, destination, and inter-event timing. The model learns the conditional distribution of normal behavior in a purely self-supervised manner, and anomaly scores are derived from per-slot negative log-likelihood (NLL) statistics, yielding a mathematically bounded false-positive rate. We augment this prior with prototype learning for known-attack attribution, second-order temporal analysis for cadence-based detection, self-learning pattern extraction, and a five-network fusion pipeline. Against an Adaptive Adversarial Agent (AAA)--a threat that learns survival strategies under defensive pressure, performs behavioral mimicry, and matches host event rates--our system achieves 93% detection at 3.84% onboarding false-positive rate. The strongest discriminative signal arises not from any single event but from the coefficient of variation of inter-event intervals: the AAA stepping cadence exhibits CV=0.310 versus 9.786 for benign sleep intervals, a 30x separation reflecting a fundamental stealth-functionality trade-off. We frame these findings within a coevolutionary economics model, arguing that behavior-grammar detection shifts the evasion cost from rule circumvention (cheap) to distribution matching (expensive), establishing a structural asymmetry favoring the defender.
Aug 1, 2026cs.CV

Beyond Static Anchors: Bounded Prototype Conditioning for Language-Free Medical Anomaly Detection

Medical anomaly detection identifies abnormal images and localizes lesions under scarce supervision while generalizing across organs and modalities. Existing CLIP-based methods reduce annotation requirements through vision--language alignment, but their normal and abnormal references, whether text prompts or learned visual tokens, remain fixed across test images. Such static references may not transfer reliably to unseen targets in a cross-domain medical imaging scenario. To address this, we propose ReCAP, a language-free framework that replaces static anchors with input-conditioned visual prototypes. ReCAP re-centers separated normal and abnormal prototypes for each image through a bounded gated modulation, enabling query-adaptive anomaly scoring while constraining context-induced prototype drift. For the few-shot setting, we introduce a non-parametric normal-reference memory to preserve instance-level target-domain variation and complement the conditional prototype branch. Across six medical benchmarks, ReCAP achieves the best image-level AUROC on all zero-shot and 23 of 24 few-shot settings, and the best zero-shot pixel-level AUROC on all three segmentation datasets. Particularly, it reduces inference latency by over 70% compared to the fastest baseline, without text prompts or test-time gradient updates.
Jul 31, 2026cs.SE

OrEdge: Efficient Multi-Modal Anomaly Detection in Distributed Software Systems via Orthogonal-Domain Learning

We introduce Orthogonal-Edge (OrEdge), a lightweight framework for real-time anomaly detection in multi-modal distributed software systems. Unlike existing approaches that rely on computationally expensive attention- and graph-based architectures, OrEdge leverages orthogonal-domain temporal representations to achieve accurate anomaly detection with substantially lower computational complexity and model size. It jointly analyzes heterogeneous monitoring data, including logs, metrics, and traces, to identify abnormal software behavior, capture temporal dependencies, and reduce redundancy across observability signals. At its core, OrEdge incorporates OrEdgeCore, a lightweight orthogonal-domain reconstruction module that captures recurring temporal patterns while suppressing transient variations. Evaluated on three real-world microservice datasets (MSDS, SN, and TT), OrEdge achieves competitive detection performance while reducing the reconstruction model size to at most 9.6K parameters, compared with 20K--143K parameters in existing methods. This compact design enables efficient deployment on resource-constrained edge devices: on Raspberry Pi platforms, OrEdge achieves sub-second inference and reduces inference latency by over an order of magnitude compared with existing approaches. Extensive ablation studies, sensitivity analyses, orthogonal basis evaluations, and qualitative case studies further validate the effectiveness of each design component. Overall, OrEdge demonstrates that orthogonal-domain temporal modeling provides an effective alternative to computationally intensive attention- and graph-based architectures, achieving a favorable balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency for real-time multi-modal anomaly detection in edge environments. The code is available at https://github.com/theamrzaki/MicroService_Twin_Original.
Jul 31, 2026cs.LG

Exploring Block Anomaly Detection In HDFS Log Data Analysis

In recent years, with the development of big data technology, increasingly more companies use HDFS for data processing and storage. As a result, the maintenance of distributed file systems has become an extremely important part of data management. As the function of server systems is becoming increasingly diversified and their services are becoming complex, the logs, recording real-time events make it easier for system operators to locate the failures and errors that happened in the server systems to make server always available. HDFS, a distributed file system, which contains large data sets, will record a large number of logs. Moreover, the logs are not always structured data, they are not stable as well. However, to detect the problems that occur in the system by checking one log by one log, it's complicated and boring work for the system operators. Using machine learning techniques and natural language processing techniques to detect the HDFS block anomaly will help the system operators to locate and fix the anomaly rapidly and accurately. This paper proposes a streaming HDFS log block anomaly workflow. It helps maintenance practitioners to use parallel computing network in processing historical log, and construct LLM-BiLSTM hybrid deep learning model to detect anomaly block in HDFS, then build streaming log pipeline based on Kafka to give one real-time HDFS log block anomaly detection solution.
Jul 31, 2026cs.CV

ReMoE: Report-Guided Mixture-of-Experts for Multimodal OCT/OCTA Anomaly Detection

Multimodal medical anomaly detection identifies samples deviating from normal patterns, where scarce abnormal cases make normality modeling from normal data practical. In retinal Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and OCT Angiography (OCTA) anomaly detection, existing unsupervised methods rely on visual feature distributions, reconstruction residuals, or encoder-decoder discrepancies, making anomaly scores depend on appearance-level deviations, while multimodal normality also contains semantic organization described in normal medical reports. To this end, we propose Report-Guided Mixture-of-Experts (ReMoE), which distills normal report semantics into an image-to-text prior student, builds modality-aware priors, and uses Report-Guided Modality Modulation (RMM) to modulate features through mixture-of-experts routing. Experiments on a private OCT/OCTA dataset with paired normal reports and a public OCTA500-3MM setting using a fixed normal report demonstrate state-of-the-art performance.
Jul 30, 2026cs.IR

RareSense: Rarity-Aware Similarity Search for Anomaly Retrieval in Transactional Data

Similarity search over sparse set-valued data is often dominated by frequent background attributes because classical measures such as Jaccard, cosine, and Hamming compare objects through atomic overlap. IDF (Inverse document frequency) weighting partially reduces this effect but remains atom-wise and cannot explicitly represent informative higher-order co-occurrences. We introduce RareSense, a rarity-aware similarity framework for sparse transactional anomaly data. RareSense mines minimal rare itemsets as intermediate structures, derives reliable rare association rules, maps objects into sparse rare-rule profiles, and compares them using weighted Jaccard similarity. Rule weights combine inverse support, confidence, lift, structural complexity, and stability, so that neighborhoods are determined by shared rare evidence rather than uniform feature overlap. We show that IDF-weighted Jaccard is a restricted singleton case of RareSense, and that the induced distance is a pseudometric on the original objects and a metric over equivalence classes defined by identical rule profiles. Experiments across four benchmark families spanning cybersecurity and general categorical domains show that RareSense attains the highest observed macro-average query-conditioned retrieval performance among the evaluated similarity measures. The statistical analysis indicates significant overall differences, with corrected paired comparisons favoring RareSense over the atomic baselines. The gains remain workload-dependent and are strongest when anomalies share repeatable rare higher-order structure. For global anomaly ranking, RareSense achieves the highest observed macro-average performance while remaining statistically comparable to several strong dedicated detectors.
Jul 30, 2026cs.CV

Towards Real-Time PixOOD: Efficient Anomaly Segmentation for Autonomous Vehicles

Real-time anomaly segmentation is essential for the safety of autonomous systems. Although recent approaches offer high accuracy, their computational cost limits their deployment on embedded hardware. This work presents an efficient and accelerated pipeline designed for both embedded and desktop platforms, targeting the autonomous driving and railway domains. The proposed approach reformulates the Neyman-Pearson scoring stage of PixOOD, a state-of-the-art out-of-distribution detection method, and deploys the full pipeline through hardware-optimized TensorRT compilation, reaching up to 182 FPS on a desktop NVIDIA RTX 4060 GPU and 75 FPS on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin embedded platform, respectively 20x and 18x faster than the original baseline. The achieved results demonstrate that advanced anomaly segmentation can be efficiently deployed for onboard processing in autonomous driving and railway applications.
Jul 29, 2026cs.RO

Failure Detection for Surgical Robot Imitation Policies via Flow-Matching World Modeling

Imitation learning has shown increasing promise for autonomous robotic surgery, yet safe deployment remains challenging due to the safety-critical nature of surgical tasks and the complexity and variability of surgical environments. Failure detection is therefore an essential safeguard, but its development remains difficult due to the challenges of scarce failure data, highly variable manipulation dynamics, and the need to balance missed detections against disruptive false alarms. To address these challenges, we introduce FoMo-FD (Flow-Matching World Model for Failure Detection), a failure detection method that learns nominal short-horizon visual dynamics with an action-conditioned flow-matching world model. FoMo-FD scores the inverse-transport nonconformity of observed endpoint latents, enabling window-level detection of visual-action inconsistencies without requiring failure demonstrations. Detection thresholds are obtained by conformal calibration on successful executions, yielding task-specific alarms without assuming future failure types. We evaluate FoMo-FD on four surgically relevant manipulation tasks with twenty failure modes across simulation and real-world experiments using the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK). Results show that FoMo-FD outperforms observation-level anomaly baselines and a prediction-error variant of the same world model, with the wrist-camera view achieving the strongest performance, including a 96.6% failure detection rate (FDR) at a 1.3% false alarm rate (FAR).
Jul 29, 2026cs.AI

INCLAIR: Inception-Based Longitudinal Clinical Anomaly Detection with Informed Reasoning

Detecting anomalies in longitudinal clinical profiles is clinically important but difficult: abnormal evidence is often sparse, patient histories have unequal length, and expert explanations are costly. We propose INCLAIR, a framework that scores each observation against multiple historical contexts, aggregates evidence at the profile level, and generates grounded natural-language explanations under limited expert supervision. Under stated within-profile exchangeability assumptions, the complete mean subsequence score takes an order-ll U-statistic form, yielding a variance decomposition and an incomplete-subset approximation that controls combinatorial inference cost independently of profile length. The same analysis shows that mean aggregation attenuates localized anomalies by a factor set by the anomaly support and profile length, motivating validation-selected top-kk pooling. Across three clinical datasets, INCLAIR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. We further validate practical relevance through a case study on longitudinal steroid profiles, comparing INCLAIR's predictions and explanations against domain-expert assessments supported by DNA analysis. The results show that INCLAIR enables clinically actionable anomaly detection under limited expert supervision.
Jul 29, 2026cs.CV

ScratchSim: A Procedural Synthetic Data Pipeline for Surface Scratch Detection

While automated defect detection such as the detection of surface scratched is an important aspect in industrial quality control, the scarcity of annotated defect data make this task challenging. This paper presents a procedural rendering pipeline that generates large-scale annotated synthetic training data using BlenderProc, with configurable material appearance, camera modes, and domain randomization, producing automatic COCO-format annotations. To show the potential of our approach, we evaluate four training strategies, namely synthetic-only, real-only, mixed, and fine-tuning from synthetic weights, across two objects with different material properties and three lightweight edge-deployable detectors, YOLOX, YOLO26, and LW-DETR. Our evaluation show that fine-tuning from synthetic weights consistently outperforms real-only training, and that mixed training effectively recovers performance under scarce real-data conditions, with findings validated across both convolutional and transformer-based architectures. The proposed approach enables scalable defect detection without the burden of large real annotated datasets, making it practical for on-device industrial inspection. The pipeline scripts, 3D model, and both synthetic and real annotated scratch datasets for a glossy toy Ferrari car will be made available through the project website upon acceptance.
Jul 29, 2026stat.ML

Early Failure Prediction from Near-Anomaly Detection: A Proactive Approach

Anomaly detection methods often have uncertain behavior with respect to samples near the distribution boundary, limiting their ability to anticipate future anomalies. This work introduces the concept of near-anomalies that, while not yet anomalous, lie close to the boundary and are likely to transition into anomalies in the near future. To address this, we propose an unsupervised method, named Christoffel-based ANomaly Anticipation for eaRly dIscovery (CANARI), which leverages the strong theoretical foundations of the Christoffel function to detect near-anomalies. The method is validated on industrial in-circuit testing data from printed circuit boards, with synthetically generated near-anomaly samples due to the lack of real-world data labeling. Experimental results show that CANARI outperforms the compared baselines that generally use a dual-threshold mechanism (one for anomalies and one for near-anomalies). It therefore provides a proactive solution for anticipating anomalies before they occur, offering a promising approach for resilience, predictive maintenance, and quality control.
Jul 28, 2026cs.NI

Robust Unsupervised Network Intrusion Detection via Federated Learning with Selective Aggregation under Anomalous Sample Contamination

Network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) have become essential for Internet of Things (IoT) environments, as malware targeting IoT devices continues to evolve in sophistication. Unsupervised learning approaches offer a promising direction by removing the dependency on labeled datasets. However, the common assumption that training data are entirely clean is often violated in practice, particularly when data samples are collected directly from deployed network devices, where anomalies are likely to be present in the training datasets. Such contamination degrades detection performance and highlights the need for robust unsupervised NIDS methods capable of operating effectively under contaminated unlabeled training data. To address this issue, we propose a robust training methodology for anomaly detection (AD) that remains effective even in the presence of unlabeled anomalies. Our method consists of two primary components. First, we exploit a known limitation of federated learning (FL), namely its tendency to underrepresent minority data. By leveraging this characteristic, we attenuate the influence of anomalous data originating from a small number of compromised clients. Second, we introduce a selective aggregation mechanism during model aggregation, which quantifies the "distance" between local client models and a global reference. Specifically, we employ the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to detect and exclude client groups whose model updates significantly diverge from the majority. This selective aggregation ensures that anomalous updates do not compromise the global model. Experiments conducted on multiple NIDS datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in environments contaminated with anomalous data. Furthermore, the proposed method maintains its detection performance even as the proportion of anomalies increases.
Jul 27, 2026cs.AI

Localized Anomaly Detection via Differentiable D-vine Copulas

Vine copulas provide a flexible framework for modeling complex multivariate distributions through a hierarchical decomposition into bivariate pair-copulas. Fitting a D-vine requires selecting a copula family and parameter configuration for each pair-copula from a set of candidates encoding different dependence patterns. As the number of variables and candidate families increases, the number of possible configurations grows combinatorially. Existing fitting procedures address this challenge through sequential greedy decisions, committing to a single locally optimal family at each step and potentially discarding configurations that would yield a better global fit. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel estimation framework that combines gradient-based maximum likelihood estimation, enabled by our fully differentiable implementation, with a beam-search strategy that maintains multiple competing D-vine configurations throughout the fitting process. This allows a broader exploration of the configuration space while remaining computationally tractable. Building on the fitted D-vine, we introduce a localized anomaly detection framework that exploits the hierarchical decomposition to produce both global anomaly scores and edge-level explanations. Statistical guarantees are provided through Mondrian conformal prediction, while the pair-copula structure enables the localization of anomalies to specific variable relationships. We evaluate the proposed framework on both benchmark and real-world datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness for interpretable anomaly detection with uncertainty quantification.
Jul 27, 2026cs.CV

DuoAD: Leveraging [CLS] Dual Characteristics for Training-Free Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

Vision foundation models have enabled strong training-free anomaly detection (AD). However, most existing approaches rely primarily on independent local patch features, leaving the global contextual information encoded by Vision Transformers (ViTs) underexploited. In this work, we identify the dual characteristics of the ViT [CLS] token: its embedding provides anomaly-invariant global semantic representation, while its attention maps implicitly highlight spatially abnormal regions. Building on this observation, we propose a fully automated AD framework leveraging global context to remove manual tunings. Our framework introduces (1) an automatic augmentation selection strategy driven by [CLS]-level semantic consistency, and (2) an attention-guided feature reweighting mechanism that dynamically adjusts patch contributions according to [CLS] attention saliency. By integrating these components over multi-level features, our method achieves stable anomaly scoring and precise localization without training or parameter tuning. Under the one-shot setting, it achieves Image-AUC scores of 97.7%, 93.2%, and 84.5% on MVTec-AD, VisA, and Real-IAD. Using a single fixed configuration across categories, backbones, and datasets, the method establishes a new state-of-the-art for plug-and-play, training-free anomaly detection while maintaining strong robustness and practical scalability.
Jul 27, 2026cs.CV

Embeddings based Anomaly Detection for Cleaning Global Crop Type Reference Datasets

High quality reference data remain a critical bottleneck for crop-type mapping at any spatial and temporal scale. Operational systems such as WorldCereal aggregate labels from heterogeneous sources such as parcel registers, national databases, field surveys, and map-derived products, each with their own biases, coverage gaps and unknown label noise. Simple global rules are inadequate, since crop phenology and observation conditions vary strongly across regions and seasons. In this study, we focus on a single, operationally relevant question: whether embeddings produced through geospatial foundation models are a viable basis for cleaning the reference data. We propose a practical, locality-aware, embedding-based anomaly (EBA) detection framework that operates on the embeddings of a pretrained Earth-observation encoder. We score each labelled sample against other samples of the same crop in the same area using a pretrained embedding, flag the ones that stand out, and test whether removing or down-weighting them before training yields a better model. We establish that the flagged points are genuinely mislabelled or misplaced in two independent ways: against synthetic ground truth, the detector concentrates injected label errors 2.5-5x above chance in its flagged set (detection AUROC up to 0.84); and on real data, a model-independent test shows that removing or confidence-weighting the flagged held-out points raises measured accuracy in trained models, for both crop type and land cover. Acting on the flags then improves the WorldCereal crop-type model across five macro-regions, evaluated on a fixed held-out split under three views. We find conservative cleaning helps while over-cleaning hurts. The EBA detector approach is designed to be reproducible and extensible, and can serve as a template for cleaning large, noisy Earth observation reference datasets beyond crop mapping.
Jul 26, 2026cs.LG

Extreme Volatility Warning under Label Scarcity via Multi-Source Anomaly Fusion

Early warning of extreme market volatility is central to financial risk management, but actionable events are rare, nonstationary, and often triggered by exogenous information shocks. In our CSI300 setting, only ∼\sim80 positive samples are observed across 791 training days, making heavily supervised multi-source models unstable. We first analyze a 100K-parameter hierarchical text-signal fusion model (HTSF) and find that added parameterization hurts in this low-label regime. Motivated by this failure, we propose \textbf{AAMSF} (Anomaly-Augmented Multi-Signal Fusion), a semisupervised framework that combines Isolation Forest anomaly scores over market indicators, GDELT events, Chinese financial news, and English media with lightweight Ridge score fusion. We further introduce \textbf{T-AAMSF}, a temporal extension for multi-day anomaly accumulation. On CSI300 (2018--2023), AAMSF achieves test AUC-ROC \textbf{0.680}, outperforming the strongest unsupervised baseline (0.630) and neural baseline (0.588), while T-AAMSF improves PR-AUC to 0.291. Ablations reveal strong source asymmetry: GDELT and domestic financial news provide complementary risk signals, whereas English media consistently reduces performance, and learned weighting is unreliable under validation noise. These results suggest an empirical design principle for label-scarce financial risk warning: robust anomaly geometry and source reliability can matter more than supervised representation capacity.
Jul 24, 2026cs.CR

Micro-Segmentation Anomaly Detection in Zero-Trust Software-Defined Network Fabrics

Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) principles need rigorous network segmentation and ongoing verification to reduce implicit trust and lateral threat propagation. This paper investigates anomaly detection in software-defined networking (SDN) systems by micro-segmentation, using deep learning models to detect harmful actions that evade traditional coarse-grained monitoring. Two models are developed: a Vision Transformer (ViT) and a 1D Convolutional Neural Network (1D-CNN), which are used to both raw and micro-segmented network flow data. Experimental findings from a simulated zero-trust SDN dataset indicate that micro-segmentation substantially improves detection accuracy. The models trained on segmented input demonstrate enhanced accuracy and F1-scores (F1 = 0.95) compared to those utilizing unsegmented raw data (F1 = 0.90). The ViT-based detector marginally surpasses the 1D-CNN, particularly in recognizing nuanced lateral movement patterns that are unnoticed in unprocessed data. These findings highlight the significance of including micro-segmentation inside zero-trust networks to enhance intrusion detection efficacy. Future efforts will broaden this methodology to include extensive real-world network datasets and dynamic online segmentation techniques.
Jul 24, 2026cs.AI

Disentangling Multi-View Scanning in Mamba for Network Traffic Anomaly Detection

Network Traffic Anomaly Detection (NTAD) is a critical task in cybersecurity, yet timely and accurate anomaly detection remains challenging. Mamba has emerged as a particularly promising backbone for NTAD due to its linear-time complexity for long-sequence modeling. It further incorporates a dedicated multi-view scanning mechanism to enhance detection precision through complementary contextual cues. However, we identify a previously overlooked structural deficiency in multi-view Mamba scanning for NTAD: redundancy accumulation. Specifically, distinct scanning branches capture substantial view-invariant information, which is repeatedly amplified during multi-view fusion; conversely, view-specific information is diluted or even suppressed, leading to representation homogenization and multi-view degradation. To address this problem, we propose DisenMamba, a novel disentangled multi-view Mamba framework. DisenMamba reformulates multi-view scanning as a two-stage disentangle-then-fuse process that explicitly separates view-invariant and view-specific components prior to fusion. This design prevents the invariant information accumulation while preserving complementary multi-view cues, yielding more discriminative representations for subtle traffic anomalies. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DisenMamba, establishing a new disentangled multi-view Mamba paradigm. Code is available at https://github.com/ikun0124/DisenMamba.
Jul 24, 2026cs.LG

An Insight on Evaluation Metrics Under the Imbalanced Case of Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is inherently characterised by severe class imbalance, making the interpretation of evaluation metrics challenging. Although metrics such as AUROC, AUPR, F1-score, and MCC are widely used, their values convey different meanings depending on the anomaly ratio. In this work, we analyse the behaviour of those four common anomaly detection metrics under varying levels of imbalance. We focus on the study of metric landscapes, visualisations that relate metric values to true positive and true negative rates, providing an intuitive view of metric preferences and stability. Our analysis offers practical guidance for interpreting and comparing anomaly detection results across datasets with different imbalance ratios.
Jul 24, 2026cs.SD

MemNMF: Memory-Augmented NMF on LPC Spectra for Anomalous Sound Detection

Autoencoder-based anomalous sound detection is attractive for machine condition monitoring because it can be trained using only normal recordings and yields an interpretable anomaly score from reconstruction error. Most prior work uses spectrogram autoencoders, but reconstructing detailed time--frequency patterns is sensitive to noise and transients, and models can reconstruct some anomalous inputs well, weakening normal--anomaly separation. We propose MemNMF, a constrained reconstruction method that operates on the Linear Predictive Coding spectrum, a compact estimate of the spectral envelope. MemNMF initializes a memory module from an NMF dictionary learned on normal LPC spectra and reconstructs each input as an attention-weighted combination of prototypical normal spectral patterns. Experiments on MIMII and DCASE 2020 Task 2 across multiple machine types and operating conditions show that LPC-spectrum inputs improve a standard autoencoder baseline and that MemNMF yields further gains, with especially strong robustness under noisy, non-stationary settings.
Jul 23, 2026cs.CV

Synthetic data generation framework for quality control automation in gravure printing

Quality control in printing, particularly in rotogravure printing, still depends on slow, costly, and subjective manual inspection. Automated surface defect detection is critical for maintaining high-quality standards in rotogravure printing. Deep learning models give prospects for automation. However, training robust deep learning models, such as YOLO or Vision Transformers, is heavily hindered by the extreme scarcity of real-world industrial defects images. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces a novel synthetic data generation framework tailored for rotogravure printing quality control. The proposed pipeline automatically generates high-fidelity images of specific printing defects (creases, streaks, misregistration, etc.) and outputs corresponding bounding boxes and annotations. To validate the framework, a synthetic dataset of 7533 images was generated and used to train the state-of-the-art object-detection model RFDETR. Experimental results demonstrate that the model trained on our synthetic data achieves a Mean Average Precision (mAP) of 80.9% on real industrial testing samples. This framework provides a zero-cost, rapid-deployment solution for automating defect inspection in printing lines without requiring massive manual data collection.
Jul 23, 2026cs.AI

Unsupervised Consensus-Based Anomaly Detection for Spatiotemporal Malaria Incidence in Ghana

A consensus anomaly detection framework was applied to monthly malaria surveillance data from Ghana (2014-2023) to identify atypical transmission patterns. Anomalies were highly structured in space and time. Ashanti and Northern Regions accounted for most recurrent anomalies, with persistent hotspots at Tamale, Kumasi, and Accra. A key finding was the spatial distinction between anomaly burden (cumulative cases during anomalous periods) and anomaly frequency (persistence of unusual behaviour). Tamale had the highest burden during anomalies, whereas the highest anomaly rates clustered in Ashanti districts, showing that high-burden areas are not necessarily those with the most frequent anomalous transmission. Anomalous months formed a statistically distinct group, with much higher case counts (Cohen's d=3.252d = 3.252) and large seasonal deviations (d>1.2d > 1.2) compared with normal months. Malaria burden alone provides an incomplete picture of transmission dynamics. By distinguishing where malaria is most prevalent from where transmission behaves most unusually, this framework can strengthen surveillance, prioritise investigations, and support targeted control strategies.
Jul 23, 2026cs.LG

Beyond Heavy Log Curation: Perplexity-Based APT Detection via Unsupervised, Context-Augmented Language Models

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) remain difficult to detect because only a small fraction of events in large-scale logs are attack-related, and investigation is expensive and hard to scale. Prior machine-learning approaches can reduce analyst workload, but they often rely on heavily curated training data and sophisticated preprocessing pipelines. Building and maintaining such pipelines require substantial domain expertise and engineering cost. Motivated by insights from a study of a strong APT detection baseline, we propose CAPTAIN (Context-Augmented Perplexity-based Threat Activity log detectIoN), a perplexity-based detector that leverages general, pre-trained language models with minimal, domain-agnostic preprocessing, enabling robust scoring of long, minimally processed log entries. CAPTAIN encodes recent history with an encoder model and a Q-Former-style bridge, then injects the compact context tokens into the decoder input so that perplexity reflects temporal context. To improve stability, CAPTAIN additionally applies smoothing filters to the perplexity time series. Across APT-oriented benchmarks, CAPTAIN competes with strong existing baselines and remains robust under substantially less curated inputs, that reduces the development and operational cost of advanced log preprocessing.