Industrial Anomaly Detection

Overview

Industrial anomaly detection aims to identify defects or unusual behavior when examples of failures are scarce and normal operation can vary across products, machines, and conditions. Visual methods often learn normal patterns with reconstruction models, patch-memory methods such as PatchCore, or pretrained vision features; synthetic defects and vision-language models are increasingly used to extend detection to new defect types. For sensor and audio data, common approaches include forecasting and reconstruction, autoencoders, and graph models that capture relationships among signals, with benchmarks such as MVTec AD, VisA, SWaT, and WADI. A central challenge is moving from strong results on curated benchmarks to reliable deployment under shifts, contaminated training data, tight false-alarm limits, and edge-device constraints.

Latest papers

260 papers33 papers in the last four weeks, up 38% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

May 30, 2026

RefDiffNet: Learning to Expose Subtle PCB Defects Before Detection

Printed circuit board (PCB) defect detection is challenging because many defects are small and difficult to distinguish from complex background patterns. Most deep learning-based PCB inspection methods rely only on the inspected PCB image for defect detection, ignoring the defect-free reference image that encodes the expected layout of traces, pads, and other PCB structures. In this work, we propose RefDiffNet, a lightweight plug-and-play input enhancement block placed before the detector backbone to enhance the image before defect detection. RefDiffNet brings one proven idea from classical inspection into the deep learning era, using a defect-free reference image to reveal defects. RefDiffNet compares the defective image with the aligned reference, captures structural changes relative to the reference, and uses a lightweight encoder to output the original image with defective regions highlighted, thereby making the downstream detector's task easier. Results on HRIPCB and DeepPCB show that RefDiffNet consistently improves performance across detector families, including one-stage detectors from YOLOv8 to YOLOv26, the transformer-based RT-DETR, and the two-stage Faster R-CNN. It achieves up to 18% relative mAP50:95 gain with negligible overhead, introducing only 0.004 - 0.005M additional parameters and 0.7 - 0.8 GFLOPs, amounting to at most 0.25% of the parameter count of any evaluated detector. Results establish RefDiffNet as a lightweight, plug-and-play, detector-agnostic input enhancement module that substantially improves PCB defect detection with minimal computational cost.
May 29, 2026

Training-Free Object-Agnostic Jam Detection in Fulfillment Centers

In fulfillment centers, diverse objects move continuously from inbound to outbound operations and can become jammed due to excessive conveyor friction, incorrect orientation, or mechanical failures. Traditional jam detection approaches rely on object detection models to identify objects, followed by tracking algorithms (such as IoU overlap and Kalman filtering) to monitor motion over time. This pipeline requires thousands of manual annotations, consuming approximately two weeks of effort, and is limited to annotated object classes. We present a training-free, object-agnostic jam detection method that eliminates the need for labeled data. Our approach uniformly samples reference points within the monitoring region when no objects are present. As objects occlude these points, we detect motion. When a sufficient fraction remains occluded beyond a temporal threshold, we classify the event as a jam. Unlike conventional point tracking--which treats occlusion as a failure case--our approach repurposes occlusion as a detection signal, monitoring whether reference points remain persistently occluded rather than tracking where they move. Our experimental evaluation on 1,069 videos demonstrates that AllTracker achieves 100.00% precision and 93.33% F1 score, significantly outperforming classical sparse tracking methods while maintaining training-free deployment. This approach offers three key advantages: (1) no training data or manual annotations, (2) object-agnostic generalization to arbitrary object types, and (3) significantly reduced development time.
May 29, 2026

Enhancing Computer Vision Model Generalization in Warehouse Facilities: A Case Study on Anomaly Detection in Vertical Material Handling Systems

Deploying computer vision models in Warehouse Facilities traditionally requires extensive resources for camera mounting, image collection, annotation, training, and deployment - a process often needing repetition in each new environment due to camera mounting constraints and environmental variability. This paper explores an innovative approach to streamline this process by conducting the standard procedure solely in a laboratory setting, focusing on vertical material handling systems and anomaly detection in forks of the systems. Through extensive experimentation, we have found that combining optimal camera placement, strategic image triggering, careful model selection and model ensemble enables effective generalization from laboratory conditions to diverse warehouse facilities environments, potentially transforming warehouse automation implementation by simplifying warehouse facilities deployment to just camera mounting, image collection, and model deployment, thereby saving significant resources and time typically spent on image annotation and model retraining. This is an experimental research study and not a production deployment.
May 29, 2026

Lightweight CNN-Based Anomaly Detection for High Voltage Converter Modulators in the Spallation Neutron Source

Time series anomaly detection is central to monitoring industrial and scientific equipment, where anomalous sensor readings can precede failures. As such equipment usually carries several sensors, a detector must also decide how to model the dependencies between channels. In many physical systems, normal behaviour is defined by how groups of sensors evolve together, and an anomaly can appear as the coupling or decoupling of sensors while each signal remains normal. Anomalies in popular public benchmarks, however, are mostly visible in single channels, so these benchmarks cannot show whether modelling inter-channel dependencies improves detection. We study this on the High Voltage Converter Modulators (HVCMs) of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), whose fourteen sensors are physically coupled and whose faults are labelled by type. Keeping a convolutional neural network (CNN) fixed, we vary only whether its blocks combine channels before or after temporal filtering, and measure detection for each SNS subsystem and fault family. The effect of this choice depends on how visible each fault family is on a single channel. Families clearly visible on one channel are detected equally well by all variants, whereas weakly separable families, such as flux faults, gain consistently when channels are combined first. Modelling the dependencies between channels therefore helps only where individual channels do not already reveal the fault. The best detector reaches an average area under the precision--recall curve of 0.816, competitive with published HVCM detectors at roughly half the parameters of a standard CNN.
May 28, 2026

Prior Availability in Industrial Visual Sim-to-Real: A Review of CAD-Guided and CAD-Unavailable Regimes

Industrial visual sim-to-real is often described as transferring from synthetic images to real images, but industrial deployment usually involves a broader mismatch between available evidence and required decisions. A system may be built from CAD renderings, simulated RGB-D observations, normal reference images, synthetic defects, pretrained feature spaces, or language prompts, yet deployed under different sensors, lighting, materials, fixtures, calibration, production variation, and rare defect modes. This review reframes industrial visual sim-to-real as a domain-gap problem organized by prior availability. We distinguish CAD-available settings, where explicit object geometry can support rendering, calibration, pose estimation, segmentation, and test-time geometric verification; CAD-unavailable settings, where geometry is replaced by normal-reference appearance, feature distributions, teacher-student residuals, synthetic anomaly assumptions, foundation features, or vision-language priors; and boundary-prior settings, where approximate models, templates, reference views, or semantic correspondences preserve only part of the CAD role. This framing connects CAD-based detection and 6D pose-estimation literature with industrial anomaly and surface-inspection literature that is usually reviewed separately. To make the taxonomy concrete, we use empirical anchors on T-LESS/BOP, MVTec AD, and VisA. The anchors show that CAD render count alone does not close transfer; source-distribution design, detector capacity, and small real calibration can matter more. They also show that CAD at test time creates a distinct verification channel through mask, pose, and depth consistency, whereas CAD-unavailable inspection relies on calibrated normality and feature deviation. The review therefore argues against a single cross-task leaderboard and instead asks what prior grounds the deployment decision.
May 28, 2026

AnomalyAgent: Training-Free Agentic Models for Zero-/Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

Benefiting from generalizability of vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP, many zero-/few-shot anomaly detection (AD) approaches have achieved impressive detection performance across various datasets. Nevertheless, they require substantial training on large auxiliary datasets to adapt VLMs to anomaly detection, and their inference largely relies on visual-text embedding similarity-based anomaly scores, lacking reasoning abilities to detect complex anomalies that require in-depth contextual understanding. To address this limitation, we propose AnomalyAgent, a novel training-free, agentic framework that leverages the advanced reasoning and generalization capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for anomaly detection. The key ingredients include 1) a comprehensive anomaly-centric toolset that enables adaptive MLLM-driven, agentic anomaly reasoning in zero-shot settings, and 2) a customized memory module that grounds anomaly reasoning with few-shot, in-context reference examples. We extend evaluation beyond the detection of simple anomalies (e.g., surface defects like cracks and dents and clear lesions) in widely used benchmarks to more diverse types of anomalies such as logical/contextual anomalies in logistics and manufacturing settings. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that our AnomalyAgent achieves substantially better performance compared to training-free VLM-based AD and generic agentic methods, highlighting its superior generalization capability in both zero-shot and few-shot anomaly detection settings. The code implementation can be find at this address.
May 28, 2026

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.
May 27, 2026

EntroAD: Structural Entropy-Guided Prompt Adaptation for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection

Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) aims to detect anomalies in unseen domains without target-domain adaptation. Recent CLIP-based methods have shown promising performance by leveraging prompt learning and visual-text alignment. However, most existing approaches rely on a single adaptation pathway, which may be insufficient for heterogeneous anomaly patterns across domains. In practice, anomalies exhibit vastly different characteristics, ranging from salient, localized structural disruptions to subtle, diffuse, and irregular variations. To address this challenge, we propose EntroAD, a structural entropy-guided zero-shot anomaly detection framework. Unlike previous methods, EntroAD introduces a dynamic routing mechanism to process different types of anomalies with specialized adaptation strategies. Specifically, we estimate patch-level structural entropy from self-attention-induced patch relations and use it as a proxy for relational uncertainty to guide anomaly-aware token routing. Based on this routing signal, we construct anomaly-aware routed tokens to better capture anomaly cues with different structural characteristics. We further introduce a confidence-aware dual-branch prompt adaptation module to stabilize visual-text alignment while preserving CLIP's transferable prior. Extensive experiments on 10 industrial and medical benchmarks show that EntroAD achieves state-of-the-art performance in challenging cross-dataset ZSAD settings.
May 26, 2026

Mahalanobis PatchCore: Covariance-Aware and Streaming-Compatible Industrial Anomaly Detection

Industrial visual anomaly detection is usually one-class: normal images are abundant, while defects are rare, heterogeneous, and often unavailable during system design. PatchCore-style retrieval suits this setting because it scores test images from a memory bank of normal patch features, but the standard Euclidean geometry ignores feature correlations and its offline construction materialises the full patch pool before subsampling. We introduce Mahalanobis PatchCore, a covariance-aware, streaming-compatible extension of PatchCore. Its artificial intelligence contribution is a retrieval detector that estimates a regularised covariance model in reduced feature space and whitens embeddings, so Euclidean nearest-neighbour search after transformation implements Mahalanobis retrieval. A bounded-memory, re-iterable training pipeline builds the memory bank without storing all normal patches at once, using incremental dimensionality reduction, online covariance estimation, and streaming aggregation. The engineering application is automated industrial inspection, where visual anomaly detection must remain accurate under practical memory limits. We evaluate the method on a public 15-category industrial anomaly-detection benchmark and three industrial datasets covering blow-fill-seal strip-ampoule meniscus inspection, amber-glass-ampoule bottom inspection, and lyophilised-cake vial inspection. Mahalanobis PatchCore preserves most offline PatchCore image-level performance on the public benchmark while reducing peak memory from 5.41 to 2.78 GB, and improves the selected industrial mean image area under the receiver operating characteristic curve from 0.981 to 0.986.
May 26, 2026

Federated Learning for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection in Industrial Automation

Federated learning (FL) has broadened the horizon for multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD). However, benchmarking such anomaly detection methods within FL paradigm poses data-centric challenges. The existing datasets do not counteract these challenges since they do not simultaneously provide sufficient scale, accurate labels, and freedom from common flaws. In addition, the role of cyclic process behavior, which is common in discrete industrial automation, remains underexplored for MTSAD for the current state of research. This paper aims to shed more light on the literature and address these gaps by introducing a dataset designed with cyclic dynamics arising from the repetitive nature of discrete automation processes and evaluates selected MTSAD methods on both the proposed dataset and a public benchmark dataset.
May 26, 2026

Memory-Distilled Selection for Noise-Robust Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection (AD) under data contamination is critical for deploying unsupervised defect detection in industrial environments, where curating perfectly clean training sets is impractical. However, existing methods are sensitive to contamination, suffering significant performance degradation as the noise ratio increases. In this paper, we propose Memory-Distilled Selection (MeDS), a training algorithm based on data selection. MeDS constructs an ensemble of partial memories via random subsampling, where the resulting sparsity acts as a low-pass filter that captures nominal patterns across a wide range of noise ratios, enabling coarse-level identification of contaminated samples. The aggregated distances to the bootstrapped memories are then distilled into a reconstruction score network, which is subsequently fine-tuned on clean data filtered using scores from the distilled model, enabling fine-grained localization of anomalies. MeDS is robust across a wide range of noise ratios without requiring noise-ratio-specific hyperparameter tuning, achieving 99.16% image-level AUROC on MVTecAD at a 40% noise ratio, and attaining state-of-the-art performance on both VisA and Real-IAD under noisy settings. We thoroughly verify the efficacy of MeDS on industrial AD benchmarks under noisy data scenarios, accompanied by in-depth empirical analyses.
May 26, 2026

Diffuse to Detect: Generative Diffusion Models for Unsupervised IC Anomaly Detection

Latent defect screening is challenged by extremely low failure rates, high-dimensional test data, and absence of labeled anomalies. We propose the first unsupervised anomaly detection framework incorporating a Diffusion Transformer. Raw test measurements are first compressed by an autoencoder, then reshaped into a structured token sequence enriched with sinusoidal and per-device wafer-position embeddings. Anomaly scores are derived from the noise-prediction error over mid-range diffusion timesteps, enabling fast wafer-scale screening without any labeled defects or manual feature engineering. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on industrial 16nm IC test data under extreme class imbalance, offering interpretable failure localization through latent-space reconstruction residuals.
May 25, 2026

Towards Active Real-to-Twin Inspection: A New Paradigm for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection

The deployment of zero-shot anomaly detection (AD) in embodied industrial inspection is severely bottlenecked by its reliance on passive, fixed-viewpoint 2D imagery. Such formulations inherently fail to accommodate the active, dynamic observations required in real-world environments. To break this limitation, we introduce Real-to-Twin Anomaly Detection, a novel task that evaluates physical observations directly against geometrically matched CAD Digital Twins. To tackle this new task, we propose AVATAR, a framework designed to learn robust semantic alignment between Real and Digital Twins. By bridging benign Sim2Real domain gaps using only defect-free pairs, AVATAR effectively transforms CAD priors into dynamic, anomaly-free references. This elegant formulation enables the model to localize diverse anomalies in a zero-shot manner as unalignable deviations, eliminating the need for defect annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AVATAR substantially outperforms adapted state-of-the-art baselines, exhibiting exceptional robustness to severe viewpoint variations. The code and dataset will be made publicly available.
May 24, 2026

ASTRO: Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Reinforcement Optimization for GNN Powered Anomly Detection in Cyber Physical Systems

Anomaly detection in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments is essential to protect the Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) from occuring run time false data injection and other malicious attacks. The increasing complexity of sensor networks and interconnected control loops makes it difficult to identify anomalous behavior hidden within high-dimensional and time-dependent signals. To address these challenges, this article introduces Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Reinforcement Optimization ASTRO (ASTRO), a novel anomaly detection framework that pioneers the use of reinforcement learning for dynamic threshold optimization. By integrating a Deep Q-Network (DQN) with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), temporal modelling and a Multi-Head Attention mechanism, ASTRO continuously adapts its decision boundaries to improve detection accuracy. The GNN component models the spatial relations among sensors, Temporal model captures time series dependencies and the attention layer highlights most informative time steps. The model generates continuous anomaly scores, which are transformed into binary decisions using an adaptive threshold, optimized via a Deep Q-Network (DQN). The ASTRO approach is evaluated on two real world industrial benchmarks: the Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) and Water Distribution (WADI) datasets. The proposed model achieves an exceptional performance on the SWaT with F1 score of 0.990. Moreover, on highly complex 127 end devices WADI dataset, it secures F1 score of 0.788, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by nearly 14%. Results across multiple runs confirm consistent generalization and stability. These experiments demonstrate that the ASTRO framework is highly practical and scalable method for strengthening the large scale cyber physical infrastructures
May 23, 2026

Dual Prototype-Conditioned Diffusion Model for Scalable Multi-Class Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Large Category Spaces

Multi-class anomaly detection aims to build unified models across diverse product categories. However, as the number of categories grows, its performance often degrades due to increasingly complex and heterogeneous normal distributions. To address this challenge, we propose DPDiff-AD, a Dual Prototype-conditioned Diffusion model for large-scale multi-class Anomaly Detection. DPDiff-AD models heterogeneous normal distributions through complementary local and global prototypes. Local prototypes capture representative fine-grained structural patterns via nearest-prototype aggregation, while global prototypes regulate holistic feature geometry through optimal transport regularization. Together, these dual-scale representations define a structured normality space. This space is refined through diffusion-based reconstruction conditioned on both local and global prototypes via prototype-aware attention. By jointly leveraging dual prototypes during generation, DPDiff-AD achieves precise normality modeling, preserves structured separability as category cardinality grows, and enables scalable anomaly discrimination. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of DPDiff-AD. On the 160-category large-scale dataset, it improves image- and pixel-level AUROC by 5.3 and 2.9 points over the previous state-of-the-art method Dinomaly+, while maintaining stable performance as category cardinality increases.
May 22, 2026

Rethinking Continual Anomaly Detection on the Edge: Benchmarking Under Realistic Industrial Conditions

Continual anomaly detection (CAD) addresses the need for industrial inspection systems to adapt to evolving production conditions, yet existing methods share three critical gaps: unrealistic evaluation, no systematic comparison, and no consideration of edge deployment constraints. We introduce a unified benchmark combining discrete-task evaluation on structural and logical anomalies, a novel continuous drift protocol, the first head-to-head comparison of all published CAD methods, and computational efficiency profiling on edge hardware. Our results reveal that existing CAD methods do not consistently outperform traditional approaches with simple experience replay. Thus motivated, we propose DINOSaur, a training-free method combining a frozen DINOv3 backbone with spatially-indexed coreset memory and neighborhood-restricted anomaly scoring. DINOSaur achieves zero forgetting by construction, outperforms all evaluated methods across all five protocols, and runs at sub-100,ms inference on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, with on-device adaptation to new tasks in under 30 seconds.
May 22, 2026

Rethinking Transfer Learning for Industrial Inspection: DINOv3 vs. ImageNet Pretraining Across RGB and X-ray Tasks

Vision foundation models pretrained on web-scale data have recently shown strong transfer capabilities on many downstream tasks, but their effectiveness for industrial visual inspection remains unclear. Industrial data differ substantially from web-data and often require fine-grained dense prediction, raising the question of whether modern self-supervised pretraining can improve over the conventional transfer-learning paradigm based on supervised ImageNet initialization. In this work, we compare ConvNeXt backbones pretrained with supervised ImageNet classification or DINOv3 distillation, and relate them to the conventional ResNet-50 baseline. We evaluate semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection across four downstream datasets spanning RGB surface-defect inspection and X-ray defect detection. We further study both frozen and fully finetuned adaptation regimes. Our results show that DINOv3 offers no clear advantage in frozen transfer, but provides a stronger initialization after full finetuning on RGB tasks, yielding faster convergence and better final performance. Under X-ray modality shift, however, supervised ImageNet pretraining remains more effective in both frozen and finetuned settings. Overall, our findings suggest that modern vision foundation models are promising for supervised RGB industrial inspection, but their transferability is strongly conditioned by downstream adaptation and target modality.
May 21, 2026

Flow Mismatching: Unsupervised Anomaly Detection via Velocity Discrepancies in Flow Matching Models

We propose Flow Mismatching, an unsupervised anomaly detection method that deliberately avoids reconstruction-based paradigms. Instead, we treat flow matching as geometric dynamics and leverage a key insight: anomalies occur at places where the learned normal flow disagrees with the geometric path toward a test image. Given a flow matching model trained only on normal images, we probe its learned velocity field along affine paths from Gaussian noise to a target image. Along each path, we compare the model-predicted velocity, which follows normal generative dynamics, with the geometric velocity toward the target, which includes any anomalous content. Anomalies induce strong local disagreement between these velocities. Aggregating the mismatch over different time steps and multiple paths yields pixel-wise heatmaps and image-level scores without test-time optimization, feature memories, or additional calibration. Our analysis shows that the population mismatch decomposes into an irreducible denoising term and a Fisher-divergence term between the test-path and normal-path score functions, which identifies the score-gap component that drives anomaly separation and explains the effectiveness of robust path aggregation. Extensive experiments on MVTec-AD and VisA demonstrate superior performance compared with SOTA reconstruction-based and recent flow matching-based approaches.
May 20, 2026

IndusAgent: Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Cross-Category Industrial Anomaly Detection

Small defects in unfamiliar product categories can be difficult to distinguish from benign appearance variations in a global view. Additional reasoning over the same view may leave this ambiguity unresolved. We introduce IndusAgent, a Qwen3-VL-8B inspection policy trained through supervised fine-tuning and tool-augmented reinforcement learning for cross-category industrial anomaly detection. The policy selects among six tools for cropping, enhancement, measurement, within-image comparison, texture analysis, and external visual opinions from Qwen3-VL-Max, then integrates returned observations into a structured diagnosis. Indus-CoT provides 3,000 trajectories from 26 Real-IAD categories, generated with actual tool feedback and screened against annotations after teacher generation. GRPO optimizes an accuracy-gated objective that conditions localization, type, and tool rewards, including call costs, on final diagnostic correctness while retaining an independent format reward. Across five benchmarks, IndusAgent achieves 83.5% mean balanced accuracy, compared with 79.4% for direct Max inference under the common protocol. Across three training seeds, the five-benchmark mean balanced accuracy is 80.5% for a weight-matched ungated control and 83.5% for the gated policy. Evaluation uses disjoint product categories and a fixed defect vocabulary.
May 19, 2026

JUDO: A Juxtaposed Domain-Oriented Multimodal Reasoner for Industrial Anomaly QA

Industrial anomaly detection has been significantly advanced by Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), enabling diverse human instructions beyond detection, particularly through visually grounded reasoning for better image understanding. However, LMMs lack domain-specific knowledge, which limits their ability to generate accurate responses in complex industrial scenarios. In this work, we present JUDO, Juxtaposed Domain-Oriented Multimodal Reasoner, a framework that efficiently incorporates domain knowledge and context in visual and textual reasoning. Through visual reasoning, our model segments the defect region by juxtaposing query images with normal images as visual domain context, enabling a fine-grained visual comparative inspection. Furthermore, we inject domain knowledge through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to enhance context understanding and subsequently guide domain reasoning through reinforcement learning (GRPO) with tailored rewards, opting for a domain-oriented reasoning process. Experimental results demonstrate that JUDO achieves superior performance on the MMAD benchmark, surpassing models such as Qwen2.5-VL-7B and GPT-4o. These results highlight the importance of enhancing domain knowledge and context for effective reasoning in anomaly understanding.
May 18, 2026

UTOPYA: A Multimodal Deep Learning Framework for Physics-Informed Anomaly Detection and Time-Series Prediction

Anomaly detection in batch processes is hindered by transient dynamics, scarce fault labels, and reliance on single-modality sensor data. This work introduces UTOPYA (Unified Temporal Observation for Physics-Informed Anomaly Detection and Time-Series Prediction), a 15.2M-parameter multimodal framework that jointly addresses anomaly detection, time-series prediction, and phase classification in batch distillation by fusing eight data modalities through Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) conditioned cross-modal attention and gated fusion. A physics-informed regularisation scheme introduced in this work enforces temporal smoothness and thermodynamic monotonicity, while curriculum learning introduces training samples in order of physical difficulty. On the 119-experiment multimodal batch distillation dataset of Arweiler et al. (2026), UTOPYA achieves a window-level test AUROC of 0.832 and 0.874 under multi-signal experiment-level scoring, substantially outperforming four external baselines (PCA, autoencoder, Isolation Forest, and LSTM autoencoder) evaluated under identical conditions (+0.147 window-level AUROC over the best baseline). A multimodal ablation over 15~architectural configurations shows that static context via FiLM conditioning is the key enabler, lifting experiment-level multi-signal AUROC by +0.145 over the unimodal baseline (0.729 to 0.874). Separately, a training ablation across 14 design choices reveals that several widely-adopted techniques, including instance normalisation, Mixup, ensembling, test-time augmentation, and stochastic weight averaging, fail to improve or actively degrade generalisation in this data-scarce setting. These negative results expose a fundamental tension between smoothing-based regularisation and anomaly detection, providing practical guidance for multimodal process monitoring deployment.
May 15, 2026

Ti-iLSTM: A TinyDL Approach for Logic-Level Anomaly Detection in Industrial Water Treatment Systems

Industrial Water Treatment Systems (IWTS) are safety critical cyber-physical infrastructures and due to increased connectivity, these systems are exposed to cyber threats that can manipulate process behaviour without creating obvious devices outliers. In particular, logic-layer deception anomalies can preserve numerically plausible measurements while breaking expected cause-and-effect relationships in the control process. These attacks are difficult to detect using threshold-based monitoring or require heavy server-oriented anomaly detection models. This paper explores the potential of Tiny Deep Learning (TinyDL) to provide lightweight on-device logic-level anomaly detection for resource constrained Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). We propose a novel framework, TinyDL-based incremental LSTM (Ti-iLSTM) which optimises the memory and space foot print of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), to detect logic-layer inconsistencies in Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) based Industrial Water Treatment Systems (IWTS). Experiments on the publicly available SWaT dataset show that the optimised model achieves high detection performance (F1-score=0.983 and ROC-AUC=0.998). A deployment-style validation on the WADI dataset confirms that the proposed light-weight framework remains applicable beyond a single dataset. The research demonstrates that combining logic-aware supervision with Tiny Deep Learning (TinyDL) sequence learning creates an efficient and accurate anomaly detection suitable for resource constrained Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) in industrial environments.
May 15, 2026

Parameter Efficient Multi-Class Intelligent Scheduling for Multimodal Online Distributed Industrial Anomaly Detection

Industrial anomaly detection has attracted significant attention as a fundamental challenge in industrial systems. The rapid advancement of heterogeneous industrial sensors has driven industrial anomaly detection from unimodal to multimodal paradigms. However, existing methods are primarily designed for centralized and offline settings, overlooking the distributed and continuously generated data characteristic of real-world industrial environments. With the advancement of edge intelligence, modern edge devices are increasingly capable of not only data acquisition but also distributed model training, enabling collaborative intelligence across the system. Industrial anomaly detection represents a critical application in this context. Motivated by these challenges, we propose a novel framework termed Multimodal Online Distributed Industrial Anomaly Detection (MODIAD). We first present a comprehensive workflow for MODIAD and then formulate a Multi-class Intelligent Scheduling (MIS) problem to coordinate cross class model updates by balancing data sufficiency and class update frequency. To efficiently solve this problem, we design a Sequential Marginal Gain Greedy (SMG) algorithm that enables effective multi-class training under resource constraints. Furthermore, to improve the computational and communication efficiency during training, we propose an Resource Efficient Class-Wise Low Rank Adaptation (REC-LoRA) strategy, which significantly reduces system overhead while preserving detection performance. Extensive experiments on two representative multimodal industrial anomaly detection datasets, MVTec 3D-AD and Eyecandies demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves superior performance and efficiency under the MODIAD scenario.
May 14, 2026

From Data to Action: Accelerating Refinery Optimization with AI

Nowadays refinery optimization utilizes sheer amounts of data, which can be handled with modern Linear Programming (LP) software, but the interpreting and applying the results remains challenging. Large petrochemical companies use massive models, with hundreds of thousands of input matrix elements. The LP solution is mathematically correct, but simplifications are made in the model, and data supply errors may occur. Therefore, further insight is needed to trust the results. The LP solver does not have a memory, so additional understanding could be gained by analyzing historical data and comparing it to the current plan. As such, machine learning approaches were suggested to support decision making based on the LP solution. Among these, Anomaly Detection tools are proposed to be used in tandem with the LP output. A transformed version of the popular ECOD methodology is applied. New methods are proposed to handle high-dimensional data: choosing the most informative pairs. Then, this is used alongside two 2D Anomaly Detection algorithms, revealing several business opportunities and data supply errors in the MOL refinery scheduling and planning architecture.
May 14, 2026

SuperADD: Training-free Class-agnostic Anomaly Segmentation -- CVPR 2026 VAND 4.0 Workshop Challenge Industrial Track

Visual anomaly detection (AD) for industrial inspection is a highly relevant task in modern production environments. The problem becomes particularly challenging when training and deployment data differ due to changes in acquisition conditions during production. In the VAND 4.0 Industrial Track, models must remain robust under distribution shifts such as varying illumination and their performance is assessed on the MVTec AD 2 dataset. To address this setting, we propose a training-free and class-agnostic anomaly detection pipeline based on the work of SuperAD. Our approach improves generalization through several modifications designed to enhance robustness under distribution shifts. These adaptations include using a DINOv3 backbone, overlapping patch-wise processing, intensity-based augmentations, improved memory-bank subsampling for better coverage of the data distribution, and iterative morphological closing for cleaner and more spatially consistent anomaly maps. Unlike methods that rely on class-specific architectures or per-class hyperparameter tuning, our method uses a single architecture and one shared hyperparameter configuration across all object classes. This makes the approach well suited for industrial deployment, where product variants and appearance changes must be handled with minimal adaptation effort. We achieve segmentation F1 scores of 62.61%62.61\%, 57.42%57.42\%, and 54.35%54.35\% on test public, private, and private mixed of MVTec AD 2 respectively, thereby outperforming SuperAD and other state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/LukasRoom/SuperADD.
May 13, 2026

Product-Aware Deep Autoencoders for Robust Process Monitoring in Multi-Product Cyber-Physical Systems

As Industry 4.0 accelerates the integration of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in manufacturing, robust anomaly detection has become critical for ensuring process safety and security. Current data-driven approaches typically employ "product-agnostic" or global models trained on the aggregate of all normal operating data. However, modern industrial facilities frequently operate under diverse product grades. While computationally simple, these global models inherently expand their decision boundaries to accommodate the variance of multiple modes, creating a "blind spot" where subtle anomalies or targeted cyber-physical attacks may be masked by the wide acceptance region of the model. In this work, we first demonstrate that the vulnerability described above is present in global-agnostic models operating across multiple product grades. We then present a Product-Aware Autoencoder as a principled mitigation that restricts the learning domain to grade-specific distributions. While this approach reduces the identified blind-spot risk, we do not claim it as the optimal mitigation among all possible alternatives. We rigorously validate this approach against a Global Agnostic baseline using the Extended Tennessee Eastman Process (TEP) benchmark. Our empirical results indicate that the Product-Aware framework performs comparably to the global baseline on standard detection metrics, while offering improved robustness to product-grade-specific operating modes. Most critically, stress tests simulating our hypothetical attack scenarios reveal that while the global model fails to detect operational deviations in 77.8% of the scenarios, the product-aware system achieves 100% detection accuracy. These findings suggest that, in flexible manufacturing environments, generalized anomaly detectors can pose non-trivial security risks, motivating a shift toward mode-aware diagnostic architectures.
May 12, 2026

Anomaly-Aware Vision-Language Adapters for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection

Zero-shot anomaly detection aims to identify defects in unseen categories without target-specific training. Existing methods usually apply the same feature transformation to all samples, treating normal and anomalous data uniformly despite their fundamentally asymmetric distributions, compact normals versus diverse anomalies. We instead exploit this natural asymmetry by proposing AVA-DINO, an anomaly-aware vision-language adaptation framework with dual specialized branches for normal and anomalous patterns that adapt frozen DINOv3 visual features. During training on auxiliary data, the two branches are learned jointly with a text-guided routing mechanism and explicit routing regularization that encourages branch specialization. At test time, only the input image and fixed, predefined language descriptions are used to dynamically combine the two branches, enabling an asymmetric activation. This design prevents degenerate uniform routing and allows context-specific feature transformations. Experiments across nine industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving 93.5% image-AUROC on MVTec-AD and strong cross-domain generalization to medical imaging without domain-specific fine-tuning. https://github.com/aqeeelmirza/AVA-DINO
May 11, 2026

MMVIAD: Multi-view Multi-task Video Understanding for Industrial Anomaly Detection

Industrial anomaly detection is critical for manufacturing quality control, yet existing datasets mainly focus on static images or sparse views, which do not fully reflect continuous inspection processes in real industrial scenarios. We introduce MMVIAD (Multi-view Multi-task Video Industrial Anomaly Detection), to the best of our knowledge the first continuous multi-view video dataset for industrial anomaly detection and understanding, together with a benchmark for multi-task evaluation. MMVIAD contains object-centric 2-second inspection clips with approximately 120 degrees of camera motion, covering 48 object categories, 14 environments, and 6 structural anomaly types. It supports anomaly detection, defect classification, object classification, and anomaly visible-time localization. Systematic evaluations on MMVIAD show that current commercial and open-source video MLLMs remain far below human performance, especially for fine-grained defect recognition and temporal grounding. To improve transferable anomaly understanding, we further develop a two-stage post-training pipeline where PS-SFT (Perception-Structured Supervised Fine-Tuning) initializes perception-structured reasoning and VISTA-GRPO (Visibility-grounded Industrial Structured Temporal Anomaly Group Relative Policy Optimization) refines the model with semantic-gated defect reward and visibility-aware temporal reward, producing the final model VISTA. On MMVIAD-Unseen, VISTA improves the base model's average score across the four tasks from 45.0 to 57.5, surpassing GPT-5.4. Source code is available at https://github.com/Georgekeepmoving/MMVIAD.
May 11, 2026

Hypergraph-Enhanced Training-Free and Language-Free Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

Few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) has made significant strides, yet existing methods still face critical challenges: (i) dependence on task- or dataset-specific training/fine-tuning, (ii) reliance on language supervision or carefully hand-crafted prompts, and (iii) limited robustness across domains. In this paper, we introduce HyperFSAD, a novel FSAD framework that is training-free, language-free, and robust across domains, offering a powerful solution to these challenges. Built upon DINOv3 and a hypergraph-based inference mechanism, our approach performs inference without any task-specific optimization or text prompts, while remaining competitive. Specifically, we replace sensitive nearest-neighbor / top-nn matching with Sparse Hyper Matching: sparsemax first selects the most relevant support patches, which are then aggregated into a hyperedge as compact normal evidence to suppress background noise and distractors. We further introduce Dual-Branch Image Scoring, which fuses spatial anomaly evidence from the patch-grid anomaly map with global semantic deviation captured by support-aware CLS matching, yielding a robust image-level anomaly score in a strictly visual manner. Notably, all components of HyperFSAD are purely visual, eliminating the need for labor-intensive hand-crafted text prompts. Under the stringent training-free and language-free setting, HyperFSAD achieves state-of-the-art performance across six datasets spanning four industrial datasets (MVTecAD, VisA, MPDD, BTAD) and two medical datasets (RESC, BraTS).
May 9, 2026

FactoryNet: A Large-Scale Dataset toward Industrial Time-Series Foundation Models

Industrial machines are actuated systems, yet most open time-series corpora record sensor outcomes alone; the few that do log commanded signals expose them in vendor-specific forms that differ from machine to machine, so commanded intent and measured response cannot be compared across embodiments. We introduce FactoryNet, a pretraining corpus for industrial time-series: 113M datapoints across 57k end-to-end task executions (15k real, 42k synthetic) on seven embodiments and four tasks, with 27 annotated anomaly types alongside healthy baselines and counterfactual pairs. Every signal in every source is mapped into a single control-theoretic schema, Setpoint, Effort, Feedback, Context (S-E-F-C), which expresses any actuated system in a common representational frame and makes commanded-versus-realized dynamics readable as explicit prediction residuals. Using the corpus, we find that a task-phase model trained on simulation, with no real phase labels, recovers roughly two thirds of the real-data ceiling on both robots, and that transfer holds within a robot family but rarely across manufacturers. Fault signatures behave differently: an uncalibrated simulator gives no detectable fault signal on either robot, and aligning the feature distributions does not repair it. What separation there is comes from Effort: motor current distinguishes faults where measured tool motion is close to chance, and calibrating the simulator to reproduce that one channel recovers a payload fault on the real robot. We read this as simulation capturing the stable structure of a task while fault behaviour stays diverse and fault-type specific. We release FactoryNet as a growing, multi-embodiment substrate for industrial foundation models.