Reconstruction-Based Anomaly Detection

Latest papers 127

22 papers in the last four weeks, up 267% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Oct 11, 2026

Benchmarking Deep Learning Models for Anomaly Detection in Real-World Cloud Telemetry

Modern cloud platforms generate high-dimensional, noisy telemetry from thousands of microservices. Unlike classical anomaly detection benchmarks, cloud anomalies are short-lived, irregular, and largely non-periodic, making timely detection challenging. We present an empirical benchmark of deep learning models for anomaly detection using a real-world IBM Cloud Console dataset. We evaluate GRU, Transformer, TimesNet, and Autoformer architectures using the Numenta Anomaly Benchmark (NAB), a timing-aware metric that accounts for early detection and false alarms. TimesNet achieves the highest NAB scores due to strong early-detection sensitivity. Transformer models also detect anomalies early but incur higher false-positive rates. An improved GRU autoencoder, incorporating robust scoring and persistence rules, achieves competitive performance with a more stable false-alarm profile. Overall, the modest performance differences suggest that real cloud anomalies are dominated by short-term deviations rather than persistent periodic structure, emphasizing the importance of timing-aware evaluation and robust post-processing.
Oct 11, 2026

Correlation-Aware Reconstruction for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

Reconstruction-based detectors for multivariate time series anomaly detection typically learn a single entangled representation of normal behavior and flag anomalies based on reconstruction error. However, real-world anomalies are not only isolated spikes in a single channel but also disruptions in the relationships between channels, where each sensor individually appears normal, but their joint behavior deviates from the norm. Because these models compress both temporal evolution and inter-channel structure into this single space, they lack an explicit mechanism to isolate such inter-channel dependencies from normal temporal dependencies, leading to lower detection rates for cross-channel anomalies. We propose CARMA (Correlation-Aware Reconstruction for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection), which is a reconstruction-based variational autoencoder with two complementary latent spaces: a temporal latent that captures sequential dynamics, and a correlation latent that is trained to reconstruct the window's pairwise Pearson correlations. Both representations are fused in the signal decoder, and anomalies are detected from the reconstruction error. We evaluate CARMA on the TSB-AD-M benchmark suite (17 datasets, 180 series) against 29 baseline methods, and show that it significantly outperforms all of them across multiple threshold-free and range-aware metrics, achieving a VUS-PR of 0.4929. Ablations show that removing the correlation branch degrades performance, that adding a second latent without supervision recovers only part of the gain, and that supervising the correlation latent with an explicit correlation target accounts for the rest and produces a sharper error response at anomalies.
Oct 9, 2026

Local Diagnostics of Learned Event Representations for Anomaly Detection at the HL-LHC

Anomaly detection, the identification of collision events that deviate from Standard Model expectations, is one of the most promising model-agnostic strategies for new-physics searches at the Large Hadron Collider. Searching for rare events in learned low-dimensional representations removes the need to commit to hand-crafted observables a priori, but sacrifices the immediate physical interpretation those observables provide. For anomaly detection to enter a discovery pipeline, flagged events must therefore be diagnosed locally, both to distinguish potential new physics from mismodeling or detector effects and to identify observables for targeted follow-up searches. We evaluate supervised and self-supervised neural embedding strategies on COLLIDE-2V, a 750-million-event dataset simulated under realistic High-Luminosity LHC conditions, using the reconstruction error of an autoencoder trained in the learned latent space as the anomaly score. Across the configurations and benchmark signals considered, supervised objectives, which exploit simulation process labels during training, generally outperform their self-supervised counterparts and, in their best configurations, improve on an autoencoder trained directly on kinematic features, raising the signal efficiency at 10% background acceptance on all held-out processes. We further introduce a local diagnostic pipeline that fits a Gaussian Mixture Model to the SM latent space, profiles each component through high-level observables without process labels, localizes the flagged events, and ranks observables by their local discriminating power. The ranking recovers the defining kinematics of the held-out processes, while correlating the anomaly score with the same observables quantifies how closely the score tracks them, revealing cases where the most discriminating observable is not the one the score follows most closely.
Oct 8, 2026

NV-Tesseract-AD: Curriculum-Enhanced Conditional Diffusion for Multivariate Time-Series Anomaly Detection

We propose NV-Tesseract-AD, a curriculum learning-enhanced conditional diffusion framework for multivariate time-series anomaly detection. Our central hypothesis is that reconstruction difficulty can be explicitly structured along two complementary axes, masking severity and diffusion noise level, and that training from easier to harder tasks along both axes simultaneously stabilizes optimization and improves residual discriminability. We integrate a Transformer-based diffusion backbone with a three-stage dual curriculum over masking ratios and diffusion timesteps, retaining anomalous samples throughout training and relying on structured corruption to drive self-supervised representation learning. We evaluate NV-Tesseract-AD under two regimes: in-distribution training on the TSB-UAD-M corpus and strict zero-shot transfer to ten EasyTSAD benchmark families without per-dataset tuning. The dual-axis curriculum produces masking-invariant reconstruction, confirmed by a near-zero loss gap between complementary masking strategies within the first training stage, and yields an approximately 3.7-fold improvement in F1 and a 56 percent reduction in MSE relative to a non-curriculum baseline. Zero-shot performance reaches F1 = 0.984 on NAB and F1 = 0.948 on NormA. Weaker results on heterogeneous families are traced to unsupervised threshold calibration rather than reconstruction quality, identifying calibration as the dominant remaining detection bottleneck. Accelerated inference via DPM-Solver++ reduces sampling cost by a factor of 3.5 to 5.7 at the dataset level but couples to thresholding behavior, establishing that the sampler and threshold must be validated jointly. Together, these findings demonstrate that aligning diffusion denoising difficulty with curriculum learning principles provides a principled and practical approach for robust anomaly detection in complex multivariate time series.
Oct 7, 2026

Unsupervised Maneuver-Aware Acoustic Fault Detection for Autonomous Drones

This paper presents a maneuver-aware acoustic fault detection framework for autonomous drones that integrates Noise2Noise-inspired deep learning denoising with maneuver-conditioned reconstruction. A key practical constraint motivating this work is that labeled faulty-flight data are difficult and potentially unsafe to collect; the proposed framework therefore follows an unsupervised learning paradigm in which only nominal flight recordings are required for training. In flight environments, acoustic signals acquired from unmanned aerial vehicles are subject to variability arising both from environmental noise and from structured, maneuver-dependent aerodynamic effects. To address these challenges simultaneously, a two-stage learning architecture is developed. In the first stage, a Noise2Noise-inspired denoising model attenuates stochastic acoustic noise while preserving fault-relevant spectral-temporal structures, without requiring clean reference signals. In the second stage, a maneuver-Conditioned Convolutional AutoEncoder (maneuver-CCAE) is trained using maneuver-related labels including drone type and flight direction to model nominal acoustic behavior under varying operating conditions. Fault detection is subsequently performed using reconstruction error as an anomaly score. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed maneuver-aware conditioning raises the area under the ROC curve (AUC) from \AUCaeOnly\AUCaeOnly (unconditioned baseline) to \AUCfull\AUCfull (full model), validating the critical role of maneuver-dependent modeling. The complete framework is deployed on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super embedded platform within a ROS2 pipeline, achieving an end-to-end fault detection latency of approximately 20 ms20\,\text{ms} per audio segment with a TensorRT half-precision (FP16) backend, confirming real-time viability for onboard UAV health monitoring.
Oct 7, 2026

Efficient Patch-Based Anomaly Detection Fused with Diffusion Driven Generative Modeling for Semiconductor Wafer Bin Map Open Set Anomaly Detection

Spatial defect signatures on wafer bin maps (WBMs) trace yield loss to specific process faults, yet supervised classifiers recognize only the defect types seen during training, and one-class detectors built on a single mechanism tend to capture either local structural deviations or global distributional violations, but rarely both. This work proposes a hybrid one-class framework that couples a patch-based student-teacher detector (EfficientAD) with a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) used for partial-diffusion reconstruction, and fuses their percentile-calibrated scores through a fixed convex combination. Trained on only 700 normal wafers from the WM-38K mixed-type dataset and evaluated on 18,658 held-out wafers, the fused detector reached an AUROC of 0.9985 and reduced misclassifications from 852 (DDPM) and 1,412 (EfficientAD) to 618, with all pairwise differences significant at p < 0.001. Beyond aggregate accuracy, the analysis shows that the gain arises from weakly overlapping errors between the two modules, yet fixed-weight fusion recovers only 40-70% of the correction available to an oracle selector. Under the benchmark's inverted class balance, average precision and F1 saturate, while the Matthews correlation coefficient and negative predictive value expose unreliable normal predictions. Pixel-level maps further show that strong image-level separability does not imply spatial localization, and the diffusion module succeeds as a local density prior rather than through global geometric reasoning. These findings motivate sample-adaptive fusion and imbalance-aware evaluation of hybrid wafer anomaly detectors.
Oct 7, 2026

A Multi-Source Ultrasound Benchmark Revealing the Limits of Contemporary Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection Methods

Self-supervised anomaly detection is a promising paradigm for medical ultrasound, as normal images are often easier to obtain than exhaustive annotations of all possible pathologies. However, most existing evaluations are limited to a single anatomy or task, making it unclear whether models learn a robust notion of normal ultrasound appearance or only a source-specific representation. We introduce the SADUSI benchmark, a multi-source ultrasound dataset designed to train and evaluate anomaly detection methods across a broad range of anatomical regions, views, and acquisition protocols. The goal of SADUSI is to provide a diverse normal ultrasound distribution and a benchmark for visible structural anomalies that can be assessed from single images. We evaluate representative self-supervised anomaly detection methods and find that current approaches struggle in this setting. In particular, reconstruction-based diffusion methods such as AnoDDPM and DeCo-Diff achieve pixel-level AUROC values of 0.56-0.72 and maximum F1 scores of 0.10-0.26, indicating limited separation of pathology from normal image regions. Feature-based PatchCore variants perform better, reaching pixel-level AUROC values of 0.76-0.83, but remain limited with maximum F1 scores of 0.14-0.40. These findings suggest that broad multi-source ultrasound anomaly detection remains an open challenge and that SADUSI can serve as a resource for developing methods that generalize beyond anatomy-specific settings.
Oct 7, 2026

Quasi-Binarized Autoencoders: An Architecture-Independent Information Bottleneck for Medical Image Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised anomaly detection, which learns only from normal images, is a central task in medical image analysis and remains an open problem. Reconstruction-based methods pass an image through an encoder-decoder network trained on normal data and detect anomalies from the residual between the image and its reconstruction. This works only if the information passed from the encoder to the decoder is limited; otherwise the network learns an identity mapping and reconstructs anomalies too. This limit is usually imposed through architectural choices, tuned per dataset, that cannot be stated in bits. We introduce the quasi-binarizing (QB) layer, which squashes each latent element into [0, 1] and adds Laplace noise of scale 1/epsilon. Each element is then epsilon-locally differentially private, and the mutual information between an image and its reconstruction is bounded by a quantity that depends only on epsilon and the number of QB elements, whatever the encoder and decoder. Placing a QB layer on every encoder-decoder path, including all skip connections, we build QBAE, a seven-level attention U-Net with 32,768 QB elements. On the seven datasets of the MedIAnomaly benchmark, QBAE with one architecture and one configuration reaches a mean image-level AUROC of 0.828, the highest among methods that do not adapt to each dataset, and the best reported results on BraTS2021 (AUROC 0.911, pixel-level AP 0.838). The noise is kept at test time, so that every reconstruction satisfies the bound. Without input corruption, the bottleneck alone prevents identity collapse (mean AUROC 0.805 vs. 0.590). Code is available at https://github.com/hanaokalog/MedIAnomalyQB.
Oct 7, 2026

MORA: Modeling Observed Changes for Drift-Robust Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Time-series anomaly detection (TSAD) identifies deviations from patterns learned from historical data. In non-stationary settings, distribution drift and true anomalies can cause similar local changes, making it difficult to tell whether a deviation reflects abnormality or evolving context. Existing methods typically adapt to detected shifts or learn drift-insensitive representations, but do not resolve this ambiguity. We define this problem as temporal change disambiguation: determining whether a local deviation is explained by broader temporal evolution. We introduce MORA, a drift-robust TSAD framework that reconstructs the same local target from paired short- and long-term views. The reconstruction gap measures contextual support for a local deviation, and a data-dependent correction mechanism conservatively adjusts the primary local anomaly score. Context can only reduce the score when it improves reconstruction of the same target. MORA needs neither drift annotations nor online adaptation. Experiments on four TSAD benchmarks show strong robustness to non-stationarity while preserving sensitivity to genuine anomalies.
Oct 7, 2026

GRC-Net: Global Representation Consistency Network for Unsupervised Multimodal Anomaly Detection

Automated quality inspection is essential for ensuring product reliability in manufacturing.While image-based methods effectively capture appearance-related defects, these methods are limited in detecting structural and geometric anomalies, motivating multimodal approaches incorporating 3D information. However, existing methods mainly rely on local patch-level representations, which often lead to unstable reconstruction errors even in normal regions. To address this limitation, we propose GRC-Net, which integrates a global-attention MLP to enforce global representation consistency across patch embeddings with a stable reconstruction module to improve reconstruction stability. The proposed method captures holistic contextual information through a global token and suppresses reconstruction noise by minimizing discrepancies between original and predicted embeddings. Experiments on MVTec 3D-AD and Eyecandies demonstrate that GRC-Net consistently outperforms existing methods at both image and pixel levels. Qualitative results further demonstrate reduced reconstruction errors in normal regions and more distinct reconstruction differences between normal and anomalous regions.
Oct 5, 2026

GCTAuto-encoder: A Cross modal Framework for Security Flaw Detection in IoT Networks

IoT encompasses diverse physical entities, from smart home devices to autonomous vehicles, creating a complex environment with heterogeneous security models. This heterogeneity makes IoT sub-systems vulnerable to various network attacks. Modern security systems must therefore be more robust to ensure security and privacy for IoT applications. A highly secure IoT system also demands real time insight, requiring data collection at the edge of the computing layer. This diversity calls for a unified security model applied at the foundational level. Edge intelligence offers a direct approach to handling device diversity. A key goal of edge intelligence in IoT is to extract insight from local data; security models can then use this data to build local node protections, and integrating AI models yields an advanced security solution. This research proposes a novel deep learning algorithm for effective intrusion detection at the edge, supported by a cloud-based IoT framework. We evaluate the proposed cross modal deep learning algorithm against baseline models. The contribution is a cross domain Deep Neural Network (DNN) algorithm for intrusion detection. The objective is to assess a multi-method deep learning model to detect intrusions in IoT systems at the edge via community detection with modeled attention. We evaluate GCT auto-encoder, a novel framework integrating edge intelligence to identify security flaws. The model significantly improves performance and efficiency. On a network intrusion IoT dataset covering multiple attack scenarios, it achieved 0.908 accuracy, reduced learning loss to 0.00156, and outperformed existing approaches.
Oct 5, 2026

Normality Constraint Learning: Adapting Foundation Models for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) achieve strong generalization by learning to reconstruct or forecast broad temporal patterns from large-scale time series during pre-training. Yet this strength can become a weakness for anomaly detection: TSFMs may model rare anomalous patterns as effectively as normal ones, allowing anomalies to be accurately reconstructed or forecasted and thus diminishing their reconstruction/forecasting error-based anomaly scores. This paper proposes \underline{\textbf{N}}$$\textbf{ormality} \underline{\textbf{C}}$$\textbf{onstraint} \underline{\textbf{L}}$$\textbf{earning} (NCL\textbf{NCL}), a lightweight plug-and-play framework that adapts pre-trained TSFMs for accurate anomaly detection without modifying their pre-trained parameters. Our key insight is to constrain the broad pattern space of TSFMs to the normal structure of a target time series, preventing their broad modeling capability from obscuring abnormal deviations. Specifically, NCL constructs a compact normality subspace from a few normal patch features and adaptively steers each patch feature toward normality within this subspace, guided by contrastive constraints that form compact and discriminative normality manifolds. The calibrated features are aggregated to reinforce normal components and fused with the original TSFM output, amplifying the discrepancy between normal and abnormal observations for the reconstruction/forecasting error-based anomaly scoring. Extensive experiments across diverse TSFM families and benchmarks show that NCL consistently improves anomaly detection performance, providing a generalizable framework for adapting TSFMs to anomaly detection.
Sep 30, 2026

Cycle-Aware Autoencoder with Cross-SignalConsistency for Railway Door Anomaly Detection

Passenger access doors are safety-critical subsystems in railway vehicles, yet detecting abnormal door behavior in real operation is challenging because faults are rare, diverse, and often unlabeled. This paper addresses railway door condition monitoring as a cycle-level unsupervised anomaly detection problem, where each complete opening-dwell-closing cycle is treated as a single monitoring unit. We propose the Temporal Cycle-Aware Attention Autoencoder with Cross-Signal Consistency (TCAA-CS), trained exclusively on nominal cycles. It combines a dual-stream encoder that processes continuous physical measurements (position, current, voltage) and binary logical states (door-closed, door-locked) through separate 1D-CNN branches, an LSTM encoder with temporal attention pooling, and a triple hybrid anomaly score fusing reconstruction error, latent-space deviation, and phase-aware cross-signal consistency. The consistency term helps identify cases where individual signals appear plausible but their inter-signal relationships become physically or logically inconsistent. On real industrial data from a passenger train in commercial service, TCAA-CS achieves 93.8% recall, 97.3% precision, and a 0.5% false-alarm rate, outperforming representative unsupervised baselines. System-level evaluation on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier supports the feasibility of real-time onboard deployment.
Sep 30, 2026

LEARN-TS: LLM-Enhanced Alignment and Reconstruction with Normality Guidance for Multivariate Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Reconstruction errors in multivariate time-series anomaly detection may not reliably distinguish abnormal behavior from benign deviations. Language-derived semantics offer complementary context, but existing multimodal approaches may rely on time-associated paired textual information that is difficult to obtain consistently and is not provided by standard multivariate time-series anomaly detection benchmarks. This setting poses two challenges: (1) conditioning masked reconstruction on window-specific semantics without exposing exact numerical targets or anomaly-specific cues, and (2) using a window-independent concept of normality as a complementary semantic reference rather than an independent anomaly detector. We propose LLM-Enhanced Alignment and Reconstruction with Normality Guidance for Time Series (LEARN-TS), which uses a frozen language model to construct two role-separated semantic representations without requiring temporally paired external text. Window-specific observation semantics encode temporal and cross-variable context without exact numerical values to guide channel-shared patch-masked reconstruction. A fixed, dataset-agnostic normality prompt provides a window-independent semantic reference for aligning normal representations and estimating normality discrepancy. At inference, masking each temporal patch once yields timestamp-level reconstruction evidence, conditionally modulated by discrepancy from a separate unmasked view. Across four benchmarks, LEARN-TS achieves the highest mean performance in 13 of 16 dataset-metric comparisons. Controlled ablations examine observation conditioning, joint normality alignment and scoring, and reference content, showing dataset-dependent ranking benefits and modest average gains from semantic over random references.
Sep 29, 2026

No Scale Left Behind: Multi-Scale Autoencoder with Bi-directional Attention for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) plays a crucial role in healthcare, finance, industrial monitoring, and other sectors. Within and between these settings, anomalies span vastly different temporal scales, from sub-second point spikes to multi-hour drift patterns. However, most existing TSAD methods commit to a single temporal granularity, and multi-scale designs either analyze different scales in isolation or are constrained to a predefined coarse-to-fine hierarchy, both failing to sufficiently capture multi-scale interactions. To resolve this limitation, we propose Multi-Scale Autoencoder with Cross-Scale Attention for TSAD (MSCAD), a simple yet powerful semi-supervised TSAD framework founded on parallel autoencoder branches corresponding to different patch sizes. A stack of symmetric bidirectional cross-scale attention blocks enables every pair of scales to exchange information before reconstruction without allowing any single scale to be privileged. On the comprehensive TSB-AD benchmark (40 datasets, 530 series), MSCAD achieves large performance gains against 50 baselines across multiple metrics, with VUS-PR of 0.57(+9.6%) on the univariate split and 0.47(+9.3%) on the multivariate split compared to the state-of-the-art.
Sep 25, 2026

Bayesian Tensor Autoencoder with Physics-informed Predictive Prior for Multi-dimensional Time Series Anomaly Detection

Multi-dimensional time series, inherently tensorial, are common in practice. Despite great progress in time series anomaly detection, most existing methods are confined to uni-/multi-variate time series. When handling multi-dimensional time series using these methods, reshaping operations are required, which inevitably break the intrinsic correlations and thus lead to performance degradation. In uni-/multi-variate time series anomaly detection, AutoEncoders (AEs) are widely adopted and generally categorized into reconstruction-based and prediction-based AEs. The reconstruction-based AE utilizes the current observation for reconstruction, while the prediction-based AE utilizes the historical information to predict the current observation. Thus, the two AEs utilize different information. To bridge the gap between reconstruction-based and prediction-based AEs, so as to fully leverage the available information and thus further enhance performance, we propose a predictive prior and incorporate it into the reconstruction-based AE. It may not be very difficult to conceive this idea, but designing the predictive prior so that it can work for tensor anomaly detection is non-trivial. Specifically, to avoid breaking the intrinsic correlations within the multi-dimensional time series, we use the tensor AE as the backbone. To incorporate the predictive prior into the reconstruction-based AE, we propose a Bayesian fusion approach and our analysis reveals that this approach can enhance the modeling capability of the model for normal data. To mitigate the over-generalization problem of AE, we incorporate physical laws, i.e. tensor low-rank decomposition rules, into the neural networks in the predictive prior, leading to the Physics-informed Predictive Prior Tensor AE (PPPTAE) framework. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Sep 23, 2026

When Does Unsupervised Learning Succeed or Fail? A PoS Perspective on Reconstruction-Based Anomaly Detection

Reconstruction-based unsupervised learning can fail in two opposing ways: a model may reconstruct anomalies too accurately or discard valid nominal variation. Using the Pursuit of Subspaces hypothesis, we characterize these failures through the meet, union, and join geometries induced by the nominal components. Excess learned range produces join blindness, while insufficient capacity produces meet preference and loss of nominal fidelity. We show that the compact nominal union is optimal among nominal faithful ranges and generally requires a nonlinear reconstruction map. Based on this geometry, we introduce Dynamic Push and Pull, which learns from controlled perturbations without anomaly labels, and nested manifold carving, which applies the same principle recursively in latent space. Experiments confirm the predicted changes in latent geometry across every tested Push and Pull configuration. The proposed methods improve reconstruction-based anomaly detection across standard benchmarks and unseen image degradations, while also improving pretrained ECG representations for downstream classification. These results connect reconstruction failures to identifiable geometric conditions and provide practical mechanisms for learning compact representations.
Sep 23, 2026

Beyond Isolated Entities: Relation-Aware Multi-Entity Modeling for Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection

Video anomaly detection for patrol robots and surveillance systems must recognize abnormal interactions among familiar entities. Existing pixel-reconstruction and isolated-entity methods may fail when individual entities appear normal but their spatial or motion relations are abnormal. This work presents Interaction-Centric Network for Temporal Entity-Relation Analysis and Consistency Testing (INTERACT), a framework for unsupervised video anomaly detection. Person-Object Appearance-Motion Interaction (POAMI) moves beyond isolated-entity encoding by jointly modeling the appearance, motion, and spatial configurations of persons and objects in each frame. The resulting representations capture both individual entity states and their cross-entity context. Based on these representations, Target Geometry-Guided Relational Interaction Prediction (TGRIP) predicts target entity interaction states from historical relational memory and target-frame geometry without explicit identity tracking. Motion-Interaction Reconstruction and Alignment (MIRA) then evaluates these predictions through conditional flow reconstruction and semantic consistency checking, providing complementary anomaly evidence beyond prediction error alone. INTERACT achieves state-of-the-art performance, obtaining a frame-level AUC of 84.5% on the ShanghaiTech benchmark. Ablation studies show that removing cross-entity attention causes the largest performance drop, demonstrating the necessity of relational modeling. INTERACT is particularly effective for anomalies caused by changes in relations among people and objects, while maintaining competitive performance in general scenarios. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/ppworkhard/INTERACT.
Sep 21, 2026

Unsupervised Brain Anomaly Detection as a Bayesian Inverse Problem with Diffusion Prior

Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) aims to localize abnormal regions in medical scans without pixel-level annotations. A typical strategy seeks to reconstruct a pseudo-healthy image that preserves subject-specific anatomy. Recently, diffusion models have been proposed to perform UAD. However, these methods rely on heuristic noise schedules or synthetic corruptions to balance subject-specificity and anomaly removal. In this work, we propose an alternative formulation of UAD as a Bayesian inverse problem under a diffusion prior. First, we introduce a latent spatial anomaly mask that models pixel-wise consistency between a test image and its latent corresponding pseudo-healthy image. Then, we propose an approximation of the unknown generation process that links healthy anatomy, anomalies, and the observed image, enabling a well-defined likelihood within the Bayesian framework. Building on recent advances in diffusion-based inverse problem methods, we jointly infer the pseudo-healthy image and the anomaly mask via annealed posterior sampling. We evaluate our approach on FDG PET (ADNI) and FLAIR MRI (BraTS 2021), demonstrating improved anomaly localization performance compared to other diffusion-based approaches and validating the contribution of our introduced model. Our code is available at https://github.com/HuguesRoy/UAD_DAPS.
Sep 16, 2026

FoundAna: A GNN-assisted Foundation Model for Graph Anomaly Detection

Graph anomaly detection aims to identify graph structures (e.g., nodes, edges, or subgraphs) that deviate significantly from expected patterns, which supports critical applications in fraud detection, spam identification, network intrusion, etc. Despite the growing methods in the field, existing approaches follow a one-model-per-dataset paradigm, limiting their transferability across diverse real-world scenarios due to task heterogeneity, label scarcity, and domain variability. In this work, we introduce FoundAna, a GNN-assisted Foundation Model for Graph Anomaly Detection - the first foundation model framework designated for generalizable, cross-graph anomaly detection by combining GNNs and transformers. FoundAna integrates an anomaly detection-specific GNN component with a standard transformer encoder augmented by four complementary positional encodings, which enable the model to capture both local and global structural information. Specifically, the positional encoding enriched node representations are passed through attribute and adjacency decoders, and the reconstruction errors serve as the anomaly score. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets spanning financial, social, and citation network domains demonstrate that FoundAna consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. The code implementation and Supplementary materials are here: https://github.com/FoundAna331/FoundAna.
Sep 15, 2026

Not All Relations Are Equal: Relation-Balanced and Calibrated Graph Learning for Provenance-Based Intrusion Detection

Provenance-Based Intrusion Detection Systems (PIDSs) detect Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) by analyzing system interactions. However, existing methods largely treat relations uniformly, overlooking statistical heterogeneity; in CADETS, relation frequencies differ by approximately 140,000×140{,}000\times. This may cause PIDSs to focus more on frequent relations and overlook differences in normal error levels across relations, increasing the risk of false alarms and missed detections. We present RECAL, an unsupervised framework using relation-balanced masked graph learning to better capture rare interaction patterns. It further calibrates reconstruction errors against each relation's benign error distribution to produce comparable anomaly evidence, helping distinguish attacks from benign behavior and reduce false alarms. On three DARPA E3 datasets, RECAL achieves F1 scores of 99.99%, 99.93%, and 99.99%, outperforming the best baseline on each dataset by 0.88, 0.82, and 0.42 percentage points, respectively. Compared with the baseline reporting the lowest FPR, RECAL reduces mean FPR by approximately 105×105\times, 4×4\times, and 41×41\times.
Sep 14, 2026

Robust Fault Detection in Mechanical Multimodal Time Series via Self-Supervised Cross-Modal Reconstruction

Fault detection is essential in industrial systems, enabling early identification of abnormal behaviour and improving safety, reliability, and operational efficiency. Modern systems increasingly rely on heterogeneous sensing modalities that capture complementary aspects of the underlying physical process. However, existing data-driven anomaly detection methods often process each modality independently or use simple feature-level fusion, limiting their ability to exploit cross-modal relationships that characterize normal system behaviour. Their performance also commonly assumes similar training and deployment distributions, whereas real-world operation is affected by changing operating conditions, environmental influences, and system degradation that induce distribution shifts and reduce detection performance, especially in unseen regimes. In this work, we propose a multimodal anomaly detection framework based on cross-modal reconstruction of heterogeneous time-series sensor data. Rather than modeling each modality independently, the framework learns system dynamics by reconstructing each modality from the others, thereby exploiting complementary information across modalities. This integrates information across sensing channels without requiring explicit temporal alignment or identical sampling rates, while improving robustness to sensor noise, missing measurements, and modality-specific disturbances. To address distribution shifts during real-world deployment, anomalies are identified using cross-modal reconstruction error and an adaptive test-time thresholding mechanism that adjusts to changing operating conditions. Experiments on three industrial case studies show strong fault detection performance and substantially improved robustness under out-of-distribution conditions, with the largest gains observed in the most challenging operating regimes.
Sep 4, 2026

Learning from VAE Errors to support ECG-based Differential Diagnosis of Myocardial Scar

Late Gadolinium Enhancement (LGE) on cardiac magnetic resonance is a key marker of myocardial scar, but its limited accessibility motivates routine ECG-based screening. We evaluated whether ββ-variational autoencoder (VAE)-derived ECG representations can discriminate LGE+ from LGE- cardiomyopathic patients in a local cohort of 300 subjects. We compared 32-dimensional features from the foundation ECGx.AI model with those from a shallower ββ-VAE trained on normal PTB-XL ECGs, evaluating downstream classification and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW)-based reconstruction errors. ECGx.AI reached an area under ROC of 0.686 with Random Forest, while the proposed ββ-VAE reached 0.577 with sensitivity of 0.775 with Gradient Boosting. Notably, DTW-reconstruction errors significantly differed between classes in 10 out of 12 leads according to Mann-Whitney U test and help in classification, leading to an area under ROC of 0.643 with Logistic Regression, supporting their potential as markers of scar-related ECG alterations.
Sep 3, 2026

Differentiable Interval Bottlenecks for Interpretable Anomaly Detection in Numerical Data

Reconstruction-based anomaly detectors are accurate but opaque: a deep autoencoder flags a sample without telling a practitioner which feature ranges made it anomalous. We propose DIFFINT, an autoencoder whose latent bottleneck is structured as a set of soft, axis-aligned interval memberships learned end-to-end directly from raw numerical data, without any discretization or binarization. Each latent unit corresponds to a human-readable hyper-rectangle in feature space; an instance is encoded by how strongly it falls inside each interval relative to the other units, and its reconstruction error is the anomaly score. This keeps the power of differentiable representation learning while exposing an inspectable internal structure. We make the inductive bias precise: a certified reconstruction-error lower bound for points that fall outside every active coordinate of the learned support (with a Lipschitz-enforced decoder), and a graded, empirically verified suppression mechanism for the usual case in which only a few features are abnormal; and we provide a closed-form, label-free importance that ranks each (unit, feature) pair from quantities the model already maintains, turning trained intervals into auditable candidate constraints without ever seeing an anomaly label. On 48 ADBench benchmarks against 22 baselines under a common [-1, 1]-normalized protocol, DIFFINT attains the best mean rank overall on both metrics (4.10 on ROC-AUC, 4.16 on AUPR); among inlier-only detectors it leads its regime clearly, and it is competitive with the strongest contaminated-data detectors (see the stratified and complete-case analyses). It is the only interpretable detector in the statistically-tied leading cluster of seven methods.
Aug 25, 2026

See More, Detect Less? Taming Information Leakage in Multi-View Anomaly Detection

In multi-view anomaly detection, more cross-view information can actually hurt. When multiple inspection views are naively fused in a reconstruction-based pipeline, normal cues from intact views propagate to the decoder, which faithfully reconstructs anomalous regions, collapsing the reconstruction gap the detector depends on. We call this failure mode cross-view information leakage and show that effective multi-view fusion must explicitly restrict the information reaching the decoder. Building on this insight, we present GLAD(Global-Local Attention Driven framework), the first framework combining vision foundation model features with local and global cross-view fusion for multi-view anomaly detection. The Multi-view Merging Attention (MMA) module performs local cross-view fusion at linear complexity with learnable view importance weighting and token-wise gating, letting each view selectively incorporate fine-grained evidence from other views at O(N)\mathcal{O}(N) cost. The Object-Guided Attention (OGA) module captures global context by aggregating class tokens from all views into a single object-level representation and broadcasting it back to patch tokens via temperature-scaled sigmoid gating, replacing the original patch representations rather than adding a residual to preserve the reconstruction gap. Experiments on Real-IAD and MANTA-Tiny show that GLAD outperforms state-of-the-art methods across sample-, image-, and pixel-level metrics, confirming that principled information restriction is key to multi-view anomaly reasoning.
Aug 24, 2026

What Remains Normal? Clean Images Miss Useful Near-Defect Normal Patches for Anomaly Detection

Normal-only industrial anomaly detectors use patches from clean training images as normal references or reconstruction targets. This assumes that clean patches are sufficient for the normal regions encountered at test time. We test that assumption directly. On MVTec AD, admitting ground-truth-normal patches from real defect images to a DINOv2 memory candidate pool raises pixel average precision (P-AP) from 73.34 to 76.95 while keeping the encoder, test-time score, and number of stored references fixed. Patches within two patch cells of the annotated defect recover 94.70% of this gain. We then ask whether useful patches of this kind can be exposed using clean training images alone. BoundarySupport inserts a procedural synthetic defect to alter surrounding context, excludes every token intersecting the nominal insertion or a detected RGB change, and learns only from pixel-preserved neighboring patches. Across three paired seeds, the same principle improves P-AP in all six memory and reconstruction settings across MVTec, VisA, and Real-IAD. Matched controls identify the altered-context feature itself as the useful normal evidence: with synthetic input or selected positions fixed, altered-context features outperform their clean-view counterparts as both reconstruction targets and memory references. On MVTec memory, the final score change is also spatially selective, with larger reductions on normal patches next to defects than on mid-distance or far-normal patches in all 15 categories. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/jw-chae/boundary_support.
Aug 18, 2026

Low-Power, Neuromorphic, Acoustic Anomaly Detection for Persistent Machine Monitoring

Persistent acoustic monitoring can detect machine faults without physical contact, but always-on inference is constrained by power, latency, and deployment complexity. We demonstrate autoencoder-based acoustic anomaly detection on an Intel Loihi 2 neuromorphic processor under clean and noisy conditions. Log-mel features are computed off chip; normalization, autoencoder inference, L1 reconstruction scoring, and thresholding run on chip. In a clean, microphone-position-invariant ToyADMOS ToyCar benchmark, the on-chip model achieves 0.9959 AUC and 0.9785 standardized pAUC at maximum false-positive rate 0.1. In the DCASE 2026 Task 2 ToyCar noisy benchmark, the model achieves source AUC 0.7990, target AUC 0.6466, and pAUC 0.6426, exceeding reported baseline metrics. Power profiling on a 16-chip Loihi 2 VPX system shows real-time throughput with 0.0406\unicodex2013\unicode{x2013}0.0426 mJ dynamic energy per sample, two orders of magnitude lower than both a CPU and GPU. These results support neuromorphic acoustic anomaly detection as a practical candidate for low-power, persistent machine monitoring.
Aug 17, 2026

Training-Free Reconstruction-Based AI-Generated Image Detectors Are Inherently Vulnerable to Adversarial Examples

The impressive visual quality and ubiquity of AI-generated images call for reliable and robust detection methods. Reconstruction-based detectors have emerged as a promising direction for transparent and training-free identification of synthetic images. However, due to their fundamentally different mode of operation (compared to standard, classifier-based methods), little is known about their adversarial robustness. In this work, we propose two novel attack methods targeted at detectors that leverage autoencoder reconstruction error. We find that by constructing imperceptible adversarial examples, the distance between original and reconstruction can be artificially increased, causing fake images to be wrongly classified as real. Our evaluation including images from three state-of-the-art generators and three detectors demonstrates that detection performance is significantly decreased, even if attacked images additionally undergo real-world degradations. Critically, our adversarial examples naturally transfer across detectors, as they all share the same principle, pointing towards an inherent vulnerability of reconstruction-based detectors.
Aug 14, 2026

Revisiting Energy-based Tabular Anomaly Detection: Energy and Reconstruction are Complementary

Tabular anomaly detection is dominated by classical density-proxy methods (Isolation Forest, OCSVM, LOF), reconstruction-based detectors (Autoencoders, VAEs), and modern non-parametric scorers (COPOD, ECOD, Deep SVDD), all of which approximate the inlier distribution only indirectly; explicit energy-based models are largely absent. Motivated by the recent revival of EBMs in deep learning (e.g., Energy-Based Transformers, JEPA), we revisit the classical Deep Boltzmann Machine (DBM) for this task and hypothesize that its mean-field energy combines more effectively with a reconstruction-based score than same-lineage pairs do. We evaluate a two-hidden-layer DBM on two tabular benchmarks spanning distinct domains (UCI Bank Marketing and NSL-KDD) against eight classical and modern baselines across twenty random seeds. The DBM mean-field energy matches the strongest baseline (the Autoencoder) on Bank Marketing and statistically beats it on NSL-KDD, while significantly outperforming the remaining seven on both datasets. When fused with the Autoencoder via rank fusion, the DBM energy yields a statistically significant improvement on both datasets (AUROC=+0.014, p<0.01 on Bank Marketing; +0.002, p<0.001 on NSL-KDD); every non-DBM-derived base model instead fails to improve or significantly degrades the AE-paired ensemble. Our position is that classical EBMs, exemplified by the DBM, deserve a place in the tabular anomaly detection toolbox as a non-redundant complementary view to the reconstruction-based scores that dominate current practice.
Aug 13, 2026

Contrastive Learning for Interpretable Anomaly Detection at Collider Experiments

Generic event-level anomaly detection for collider physics has two recurring problems: anomaly scores are hard to interpret, and they correlate strongly with energy scale and object multiplicity. We present Organized Representation via Contrastive learning for Anomaly detection (ORCA), a two-stage framework that first learns an embedding space via supervised contrastive learning across a diverse set of physics processes, then runs a standard autoencoder in that space to generate event-level anomaly scores. On a simulated dataset consistent with conditions at the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, ORCA delivers significant gains in both breadth and depth of sensitivity to new physics signals with respect to a baseline autoencoder architecture. Beyond improved sensitivity, the contrastive embedding makes the anomalous sample interpretable: because known processes occupy distinct regions of the space, a maximum-likelihood template fit to the embedding distributions can attribute events in an anomalous sample to template physics processes with quantified uncertainties. We demonstrate that the fit accurately recovers injected signal yields, including for signals excluded from the training of the embedding, and characterizes signals absent from the template library through the known processes they most resemble. These results establish ORCA as a route to interpretable anomaly detection-based searches at colliders, where the embedding geometry carries higher dimensional physics information compared to standard one-dimensional output fits, enhancing downstream statistical analysis.