arXiv Machine Learning

Mitigating Convergence Collapse in Fixed-Target Anomaly Detectors via Kernel-Anchored Locality Regularization

The paper studies a class of tabular anomaly detectors that train a neural map toward a fixed target using squared‑error loss, noting that improved optimization can paradoxically worsen detection performance—a phenomenon termed convergence collapse. It demonstrates that this collapse arises because the learned map extrapolates beyond the training data, erasing residual signals on anomalies. To address this, the authors introduce Kernel Contraction Matching (KCM), a closed‑form, training‑free kernel‑based baseline, and propose the Kernel‑Anchored Regularizer (KAR), which penalizes deviations from a kernel‑weighted average of training targets, thereby mitigating collapse and improving AUROC during extended training.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Oct 5

Adapting prior-data fitted networks for tabular anomaly detection

The paper explores how prior-data fitted networks (PFNs) can be adapted for anomaly detection in tabular data. Using frozen TabPFN features, the authors show that scoring samples by nearest-neighbor distance in feature space yields strong results, and they identify optimal layers and extraction procedures. They further improve performance by fine‑tuning the model on a reference set, achieving higher AUROC on the ADBench benchmark with both a fine‑tuning‑free (ZEN) and a fine‑tuned (FOCUS) approach.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

Differentiable Interval Bottlenecks for Interpretable Anomaly Detection in Numerical Data

DIFFINT is a reconstruction‑based anomaly detector that uses a differentiable autoencoder with a latent bottleneck composed of soft, axis‑aligned interval memberships. Each latent unit represents a human‑readable hyper‑rectangle in feature space, allowing the model to encode how strongly an instance falls inside each interval and to compute reconstruction error as the anomaly score. The method provides a certified lower bound on reconstruction error for points outside all active intervals, a suppression mechanism for sparse abnormalities, and a closed‑form, label‑free importance ranking for each (unit, feature) pair, achieving top performance on 48 ADBench benchmarks against 22 baselines.

By Lamine Diop, Marc Plantevit
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

Differentiable Interval Bottlenecks for Interpretable Anomaly Detection in Numerical Data

DIFFINT is a reconstruction‑based anomaly detector that replaces the opaque latent bottleneck of a standard autoencoder with a set of soft, axis‑aligned interval memberships learned directly from raw numerical data. Each latent unit represents a human‑readable hyper‑rectangle, and an instance’s anomaly score is its reconstruction error weighted by how strongly it falls inside these intervals. The method provides a certified lower bound on reconstruction error for points outside all active intervals, a graded suppression mechanism for sparse anomalies, and a closed‑form, label‑free importance ranking for each (unit, feature) pair, achieving top performance on 48 ADBench benchmarks against 22 baselines. whyItMatters":"DIFFINT offers the first interpretable anomaly detector that maintains competitive performance while revealing which feature ranges drive each anomaly score, enabling practitioners to audit and understand model decisions without requiring anomaly labels."

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

Neural-Collapse-guided Task-Free Continual Anomaly Detection

The paper introduces NC‑TFAD, a task‑free continual anomaly detection framework that leverages neural‑collapse geometry to learn from non‑stationary data streams without task boundaries. It freezes a pretrained backbone, aligns streaming features to a simplex Equiangular Tight Frame prototype space, and uses synthetic anomaly anchors, inter‑ and intra‑class regularization, and a Focal Neural Collapse Contrastive loss to stabilize representations and enhance normal‑anomaly separability. A normal‑patch‑prototype‑guided localization branch generates calibrated anomaly heatmaps, and extensive experiments on MVTec AD and VisA demonstrate that NC‑TFAD outperforms existing task‑free continual learning and unified anomaly detection baselines in both image‑level detection and pixel‑level localization.

By Xiaotong Kong, Chaoyang Song, Ziai Zhou, Jinxia Zhang, Kanjian Zhang, Haikun Wei
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

Neural-Collapse-guided Task-Free Continual Anomaly Detection

The paper introduces NC‑TFAD, a task‑free continual anomaly detection framework that leverages neural‑collapse geometry to handle non‑stationary data streams in industrial visual inspection. It freezes a pretrained backbone, aligns streaming features to a simplex Equiangular Tight Frame prototype space, and uses synthetic anomaly anchors, inter‑ and intra‑class regularization, and a Focal Neural Collapse Contrastive loss to stabilize representations and enhance normal‑anomaly separability. A normal‑patch‑prototype‑guided localization branch generates calibrated anomaly heatmaps without pixel‑level annotations, and experiments on MVTec AD and VisA demonstrate that NC‑TFAD outperforms existing task‑free continual learning and unified anomaly detection baselines in both image‑level detection and pixel‑level localization.

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 1

Beyond Normal References: Discriminative Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

This paper introduces IDEAL, a framework for few-shot anomaly detection that uses both normal and anomalous reference examples. IDEAL suppresses irrelevant normal variations and encodes intrinsic deviation vectors that capture discriminative anomaly directions. Experiments on eight real-world datasets show that IDEAL generalizes to unseen anomalies and outperforms existing methods.

By Huan Wang, Jun Shen, Jun Yan, Guansong Pang