Anomaly Localization

Latest papers 104

Apr 26, 2026cs.CV

Learning to Identify Out-of-Distribution Objects for 3D LiDAR Anomaly Segmentation

Understanding the surrounding environment is fundamental in autonomous driving and robotic perception. Distinguishing between known classes and previously unseen objects is crucial in real-world environments, as done in Anomaly Segmentation. However, research in the 3D field remains limited, with most existing approaches applying post-processing techniques from 2D vision. To cover this lack, we propose a new efficient approach that directly operates in the feature space, modeling the feature distribution of inlier classes to constrain anomalous samples. Moreover, the only publicly available 3D LiDAR anomaly segmentation dataset contains simple scenarios, with few anomaly instances, and exhibits a severe domain gap due to its sensor resolution. To bridge this gap, we introduce a set of mixed real-synthetic datasets for 3D LiDAR anomaly segmentation, built upon established semantic segmentation benchmarks, with multiple out-of-distribution objects and diverse, complex environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art and competitive results on the existing real-world dataset and the newly introduced mixed datasets, respectively, validating the effectiveness of our method and the utility of the proposed datasets. Code and datasets are available at https://simom0.github.io/lido-page/.
Apr 24, 2026cs.CV

Anatomy-Aware Unsupervised Detection and Localization of Retinal Abnormalities in Optical Coherence Tomography

Reliable automated analysis of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) imaging is crucial for diagnosing retinal disorders but faces a critical barrier: the need for expensive, labor-intensive expert annotations. Supervised deep learning models struggle to generalize across diverse pathologies, imaging devices, and patient populations due to their restricted vocabulary of annotated abnormalities. We propose an unsupervised anomaly detection framework that learns the normative distribution of healthy retinal anatomy without lesion annotations, directly addressing annotation efficiency challenges in clinical deployment. Our approach leverages a discrete latent model trained on normal B-scans to capture OCT-specific structural patterns. To enhance clinical robustness, we incorporate retinal layer-aware supervision and structured triplet learning to separate healthy from pathological representations, improving model reliability across varied imaging conditions. During inference, anomalies are detected and localized via reconstruction discrepancies, enabling both image and pixel-level identification without requiring disease-specific labels. On the Kermany dataset (AUROC: 0.799), our method substantially outperforms VAE, VQVAE, VQGAN, and f-AnoGAN baselines. Critically, cross-dataset evaluation on Srinivasan achieves AUROC 0.884 with superior generalization, demonstrating robust domain adaptation. On the external RETOUCH benchmark, unsupervised anomaly segmentation achieves competitive Dice (0.200) and mIoU (0.117) scores, validating reproducibility across institutions.
Apr 22, 2026cs.LG

Robustness of Spatio-temporal Graph Neural Networks for Fault Location in Partially Observable Distribution Grids

Fault location in distribution grids is critical for reliability and minimizing outage durations. Yet, it remains challenging due to partial observability, given sparse measurement infrastructure. Recent works show promising results by combining Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for spatio-temporal learning. Still, many modern GNN architectures remain untested for this grid application, while existing GNN solutions have not explored GNN topology definitions beyond simply adopting the full grid topology to construct the GNN graph. We address these gaps by (i) systematically comparing a newly proposed graph-forming strategy (measured-only) to the traditional full-topology approach, and (ii) introducing STGNN (Spatio-temporal GNN) models based on GraphSAGE and an improved Graph Attention (GATv2), for distribution grid fault location; (iii) benchmarking them against state-of-the-art STGNN and RNN baselines on the IEEE 123-bus feeder. In our experiments, all evaluated STGNN variants achieve high performance and consistently outperform a pure RNN baseline, with improvements up to 11 percentage points F1. Among STGNN models, the newly explored RGATv2 and RGSAGE achieve only marginally higher F1 scores. Still, STGNNs demonstrate superior stability, with tight confidence intervals (within +/- 1.4%) compared to the RNN baseline (up to +/- 7.5%) across different experiment runs. Finally, our proposed reduced GNN topology (measured-only) shows clear benefits in both (i) model training time (6-fold reduction) and (ii) model performance (up to 11 points F1). This suggests that measured-only graphs offer a more practical, efficient, and robust framework for partially observable distribution grids.
Apr 20, 2026cs.LG

Causally-Constrained Probabilistic Forecasting for Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in multivariate time series is a central challenge in industrial monitoring, as failures frequently arise from complex temporal dynamics and cross-sensor interactions. While recent deep learning models, including graph neural networks and Transformers, have demonstrated strong empirical performance, most approaches remain primarily correlational and offer limited support for causal interpretation and root-cause localization. This study introduces a causally-constrained probabilistic forecasting framework which is a Causally Guided Transformer (CGT) model for multivariate time-series anomaly detection, integrating an explicit time-lagged causal graph prior with deep sequence modeling. For each target variable, a dedicated forecasting block employs a hard parent mask derived from causal discovery to restrict the main prediction pathway to graph-supported causes, while a latent Gaussian head captures predictive uncertainty. To leverage residual correlational information without compromising the causal representation, a shadow auxiliary path with stop-gradient isolation and a safety-gated blending mechanism is incorporated to suppress non-causal contributions when reliability is low. Anomalies are identified using negative log-likelihood scores with adaptive streaming thresholding, and root-cause variables are determined through per-dimension probabilistic attribution and counterfactual clamping. Experiments on the ASD and SMD benchmarks indicate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art detection performance, with F1-scores of 96.19% on ASD and 95.32% on SMD, and enhances variable-level attribution quality. These findings suggest that causal structural priors can improve both robustness and interpretability in detecting deep anomalies in multivariate sensor systems.
Apr 20, 2026cs.CV

ZSG-IAD: A Multimodal Framework for Zero-Shot Grounded Industrial Anomaly Detection

Deep learning-based industrial anomaly detectors often behave as black boxes, making it hard to justify decisions with physically meaningful defect evidence. We propose ZSG-IAD, a multimodal vision-language framework for zero-shot grounded industrial anomaly detection. Given RGB images, sensor images, and 3D point clouds, ZSG-IAD generates structured anomaly reports and pixel-level anomaly masks. ZSG-IAD introduces a language-guided two-hop grounding module: (1) anomaly-related sentences select evidence-like latent slots distilled from multimodal features, yielding coarse spatial support; (2) selected slots modulate feature maps via channel-spatial gating and a lightweight decoder to produce fine-grained masks. To improve reliability, we further apply Executable-Rule GRPO with verifiable rewards to promote structured outputs, anomaly-region consistency, and reasoning-conclusion coherence. Experiments across multiple industrial anomaly benchmarks show strong zero-shot performance and more transparent, physically grounded explanations than prior methods. We will release code and annotations to support future research on trustworthy industrial anomaly detection systems.
Apr 19, 2026cs.LG

Conditional Attribution for Root Cause Analysis in Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Root cause analysis (RCA) for time-series anomaly detection is critical for the reliable operation of complex real-world systems. Existing explanation methods often rely on unrealistic feature perturbations and ignore temporal and cross-feature dependencies, leading to unreliable attributions. We propose a conditional attribution framework that explains anomalies relative to contextually similar normal system states. Instead of using marginal or randomly sampled baselines, our method retrieves representative normal instances conditioned on the anomalous observation, enabling dependency-preserving and operationally meaningful explanations. To support high-dimensional time-series data, contextual retrieval is performed in learned low-dimensional representations using both variational autoencoder latent spaces and UMAP manifold embeddings. By grounding the retrieval process in the system's learned manifold, this strategy avoids out-of-distribution artifacts and ensures attribution fidelity while maintaining computational efficiency. We further introduce confidence-aware and temporal evaluation metrics for assessing explanation reliability and responsiveness. Experiments on the SWaT and MSDS benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently improves root-cause identification accuracy, temporal localization, and robustness across multiple anomaly detection models. These results highlight the practical utility of conditional attribution for explainable anomaly diagnosis in complex time-series systems. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/dfki-av/Conditional-Attribution-for-Root-Cause-Analysis-in-Time-Series-Anomaly-Detection.
Apr 16, 2026cs.CV

AD4AD: Benchmarking Visual Anomaly Detection Models for Safer Autonomous Driving

The reliability of a machine vision system for autonomous driving depends heavily on its training data distribution. When a vehicle encounters significantly different conditions, such as atypical obstacles, its perceptual capabilities can degrade substantially. Unlike many domains where errors carry limited consequences, failures in autonomous driving translate directly into physical risk for passengers, pedestrians, and other road users. To address this challenge, we explore Visual Anomaly Detection (VAD) as a solution. VAD enables the identification of anomalous objects not present during training, allowing the system to alert the driver when an unfamiliar situation is detected. Crucially, VAD models produce pixel-level anomaly maps that can guide driver attention to specific regions of concern without requiring any prior assumptions about the nature or form of the hazard. We benchmark eight state-of-the-art VAD methods on AnoVox, the largest synthetic dataset for anomaly detection in autonomous driving. In particular, we evaluate performance across four backbone architectures spanning from large networks to lightweight ones such as MobileNet and DeiT-Tiny. Our results demonstrate that VAD transfers effectively to road scenes. Notably, Tiny-Dinomaly achieves the best accuracy-efficiency trade-off for edge deployment, matching full-scale localization performance at a fraction of the memory cost. This study represents a concrete step toward safer, more responsible deployment of autonomous vehicles, ultimately improving protection for passengers, pedestrians, and all road users.
Apr 14, 2026cs.AI

Fun-TSG: A Function-Driven Multivariate Time Series Generator with Variable-Level Anomaly Labeling

Reliable evaluation of anomaly detection methods in multivariate time series remains an open challenge, largely due to the limitations of existing benchmark datasets. Current resources often lack fine-grained anomaly annotations, do not provide explicit intervariable and temporal dependencies, and offer little insight into the underlying generative mechanisms. These shortcomings hinder the development and rigorous comparison of detection models, especially those targeting interpretable and variable-specific outputs. To address this gap, we introduce Fun-TSG, a fully customizable time series generator designed to support high-quality evaluation of anomaly detection systems. Our tool enables both fully automated generation, based on randomly sampled dependency structures and anomaly types, and manual generation through user-defined equations and anomaly configurations. In both cases, it provides full transparency over the data generation process, including access to ground-truth anomaly labels at the variable and timestamp levels. Fun-TSG supports the creation of diverse, interpretable, and reproducible benchmarking scenarios, enabling fine-grained performance analysis for both classical and modern anomaly detection models.
Apr 2, 2026cs.AI

GenGait: A Transformer-Based Model for Human Gait Anomaly Detection and Normative Twin Generation

Gait analysis provides an objective characterization of locomotor function and is widely used to support diagnosis and rehabilitation monitoring across neurological and orthopedic disorders. Deep learning has been increasingly applied to this domain, yet most approaches rely on supervised classifiers trained on disease-labeled data, limiting generalization to heterogeneous pathological presentations. The methodological objective of this work is to develop a label-free framework for joint-level anomaly detection and kinematic correction based on a Transformer masked autoencoder trained exclusively on normative gait sequences from 150 adults, acquired with a markerless multi-camera motion-capture system. At inference, a two-pass procedure is applied to potentially pathological input sequences: first, it estimates joint inconsistency scores by occluding individual joints and measuring deviations from the learned normative prior. Then, it withholds the flagged joints from the encoder input and reconstructs the full skeleton from the remaining spatiotemporal context, yielding corrected kinematic trajectories at the flagged positions. The validation objective is to assess whether the framework preserves unseen normative gait and reduces angular deviation in simulated abnormal gait patterns. In this proof-of-concept evaluation, data from 10 held-out normative participants, who performed seven simulated abnormal gait patterns, showed a significant reduction in angular deviation across all analyzed joints with large effect sizes, and preservation of normative kinematics. The proposed approach enables interpretable, subject-specific localization of joints that are inconsistent with learned normative gait patterns and generation of an individualized normative reconstruction without requiring disease labels. Video is available at https://youtu.be/Rcm3jqR5pN4.
Mar 26, 2026cs.CV

Hyperspectral Trajectory Image for Multi-Month Trajectory Anomaly Detection

Trajectory anomaly detection underpins applications from fraud detection to urban mobility analysis. Dense GPS preserves fine-grained evidence such as abnormal speeds and short-duration events, but its quadratic cost makes multi-month analysis intractable; sparse stay-point methods scale by discarding that evidence and require a separate modeling regime. We argue that this bottleneck is unnecessary: dense and sparse trajectories share a natural two-dimensional cyclic structure along within-day and across-day axes. TITAnD (Trajectory Image Transformer for Anomaly Detection) is the first framework to cast both in a single representation, a Hyperspectral Trajectory Image (HTI), a day ×\times time-of-day grid whose channels encode spatial, semantic, temporal, and kinematic information. Under this formulation, agent-level detection reduces to image classification and temporal localization to semantic segmentation. The Cyclic Factorized Transformer (CFT) models the two temporal axes directly, reducing attention cost by up to two orders of magnitude. With the HTI, multi-month dense anomaly detection becomes feasible for the first time, and CFT keeps it accurate and fast. Empirically, TITAnD matches or beats every evaluated baseline in AUC-PR on all four benchmarks. It surpasses vision models such as U-Net while using as few as 6.5M parameters, and it runs 11--75×\times faster than a capacity-matched flat Transformer on the same trajectory images.
Aug 27, 2025cs.CV

Diverse Normal Prototypes-Guided Contrastive Reconstruction for Medical Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in medical images is challenging due to limited annotations and the domain gap. Existing reconstruction-based methods often rely on frozen pre-trained encoders, restricting adaptation to domain-specific patterns and degrading localization accuracy. Meanwhile, prototype-based learning offers interpretable representations but commonly suffers from prototype collapse, where a few prototypes dominate training and reduce diversity. To address these issues, we propose DNP-ConFormer, a unified framework that integrates a trainable encoder with prototype-guided reconstruction and a Diversity-Aware Alignment Loss. A momentum encoder enables stable domain-adaptive representation learning, while a lightweight Prototype Extractor discovers informative normal prototypes and injects them into the decoder via attention to guide reconstruction. The proposed alignment objective further encourages balanced feature-to-prototype assignments, effectively mitigating prototype collapse. Extensive experiments on multiple medical imaging benchmarks demonstrate improved representation quality and anomaly localization compared with prior methods. Visualization and prototype assignment analyses further validate the effectiveness and interpretability of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/liluhu0/DNP-ConFormer.
Aug 6, 2025cs.CV

AD-FM: Multimodal LLMs for Anomaly Detection via Multi-Stage Reasoning and Fine-Grained Reward Optimization

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, their application to specialized anomaly detection (AD) remains constrained by domain adaptation challenges. Existing Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) based approaches suffer from two critical limitations: inadequate training data utilization when models produce uniform responses, and insufficient supervision over reasoning processes that encourage immediate binary decisions without deliberative analysis. We propose a comprehensive framework addressing these limitations through two synergistic innovations. First, we introduce a multi-stage deliberative reasoning process that guides models from region identification to focused examination, generating diverse response patterns essential for GRPO optimization while enabling structured supervision over analytical workflows. Second, we develop a fine-grained reward mechanism incorporating classification accuracy and localization supervision, transforming binary feedback into continuous signals that distinguish genuine analytical insight from spurious correctness. Comprehensive evaluation across multiple industrial datasets demonstrates substantial performance improvements in adapting general vision-language models to specialized anomaly detection. Our method achieves superior accuracy with efficient adaptation of existing annotations, effectively bridging the gap between general-purpose MLLM capabilities and the fine-grained visual discrimination required for detecting subtle manufacturing defects and structural irregularities.
Jul 25, 2025cs.LG

OCSVM-Guided Representation Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) aims to detect anomalies without labeled data, a necessity in many machine learning applications where anomalous samples are rare or not available. Most state-of-the-art methods fall into two categories: reconstruction-based approaches, which often reconstruct anomalies too well, and decoupled representation learning with density estimators, which can suffer from suboptimal feature spaces. While some recent methods attempt to couple feature learning and anomaly detection, they often rely on surrogate objectives, restrict kernel choices, or introduce approximations that limit their expressiveness and robustness. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method that couples representation learning the exact One-Class SVM (OCSVM) optimization problem, through a custom loss formulation that directly aligns latent features with the OCSVM decision boundary. The model is evaluated on two tasks: a benchmark based on MNIST-C, and a challenging brain MRI lesion detection task. Unlike most methods that focus on large, hyperintense lesions at the image level, our approach succeeds to target small, non-hyperintense lesions, while we evaluate voxel-wise metrics, addressing a more clinically relevant scenario. Both experiments evaluate a form of robustness to domain shifts, including corruption types in MNIST-C and texture or population age variations in MRI. Results demonstrate performance and robustness of our proposed model, highlighting its potential for general UAD and real-world medical imaging applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/Nicolas-Pinon/uad\_ocsvm\_guided\_repr\_learning.
Date pendingcs.CV

Auditing Frame-Level AUC in Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection: Granularity, Resolution, and Scene Bias

Frame-level area under the ROC curve (AUC) is the dominant evaluation metric for weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WSVAD). Its standard form measures whether an anomalous frame outranks a normal frame drawn from anywhere in the test set. We refer to this comparison as pooled AUC, since it aggregates frame pairs across test videos regardless of source. Pooled AUC therefore credits both event localization and differences between video sources. We audit this protocol on UCF-Crime across recent state-of-the-art models spanning different backbone families. Holding each model's frame scores fixed, we read them under three pairing granularities: global, per anomaly category, and within each video, then repeat the same three-granularity readout on zero-shot scores computed from the models' internal representations. We assess ranking reliability with a paired video bootstrap. Three findings follow. First, pooled AUC does not reliably predict within-video anomaly localization: models with similar pooled scores exhibit large localization differences and rank reversals under stricter granularities. Second, at the benchmark's test-split size, pooled AUC lacks the resolution to support state-of-the-art margins reported in the field. Within each backbone family, it resolves no comparison at those margins, while within-video AUC resolves several over identical predictions. Learned representations further reveal that within-video anomaly structure and detector localization are decoupled. Third, on normal footage alone, every model we examine separates videos by recording properties, such as resolution and color encoding, indicating that scene sensitivity is shared across the setting rather than specific to any architecture. We publicly release a granularity-aware protocol computable from existing predictions and scene-factor annotations for UCF-Crime.