arXiv Machine Learning

Distribution-free false-alarm calibration and chance-corrected spatial evaluation for industrial anomaly detection

arXiv:2608. 15090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Studies of industrial visual inspection commonly report the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and the overlap between anomaly maps and defect masks.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

SafeRestore: Detector-Relative Risk Certificates for Selective Industrial Image Restoration

SafeRestore introduces a framework for certifying when an industrial image restoration should be automatically returned to a detector or require human review. It ranks five restoration candidates using action‑specific fitted scores, selects a threshold gate on tuning data, and evaluates the gate on a separate certification sample with two one‑sided exact binomial bounds—one for evidence‑loss incidents and one for excess‑activation incidents. In a retrospective study of 4,591 Carinthia‑S images, the protocol demonstrates auditable risk‑coverage behavior, with varying pass rates across different policies and morphologies.

By Shaoliang Yang, Jun Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

When More References Hurt: Contamination-Aware DINOv2 Memory Banks for Few-Shot Steel Defect Detection

The paper investigates how to improve patch‑memory anomaly detectors for steel defect detection when additional industrial images may contain unseen defects. By filtering out the most suspicious 20% of patches from a contaminated reference bank and merging the remaining patches with a clean seed bank, the authors reduce contamination from 9.46% to 2.59% and achieve higher AUPRC scores compared to naive expansion or random removal. The method demonstrates that reference purity is a critical design factor and that unverified images can be beneficial only after explicit filtering.

By Hannaneh Kalantari, Javad Khoramdel
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Training-Free Human-in-the-Loop Anomaly Detection via Memory Bank Correction

The paper introduces a training‑free, human‑in‑the‑loop anomaly detection framework that allows a domain expert to correct a PatchCore detector by editing its memory bank, without retraining or using gradients. Using only ten golden samples, operator corrections close a median 66% of the performance gap to a fully trained bank, improving 12 of 15 MVTec AD categories while harming none. The approach is evaluated with a rigorous held‑out protocol and shows that passive and active querying yield statistically indistinguishable gains, with a defect‑memory extension failing decisively.

By Ayusha Abbas, Saram Abbas, Kabita Adhikari
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

How Many Categories Are Enough? Distribution-Free Certification Limits for Few-Shot Anomaly Thresholds

The paper investigates how many normal samples are required to reliably set an alarm threshold for few‑shot anomaly detectors, focusing on distribution‑free certification limits. Using a frozen DINOv2 PCA residual ranker on 15 MVTec and 12 VisA categories, the authors show that simple leave‑one‑image‑out calibration is limited by resolution and shift, leading to empirical false‑alarm rates far above the nominal level. They derive a category‑count feasibility calculus, demonstrating that at least 14, 29, and 59 independent category draws are needed for 95% upper confidence bounds at α=0.20, 0.10, and 0.05, and propose the CRESS protocol to split source categories into reference, proposal, and certification roles. whyItMatters":"The study provides concrete numerical thresholds for the amount of source evidence needed to guarantee reliable anomaly detection in new categories, informing practical deployment of few‑shot detectors."

By Gia Huy Thai, Nguyen Thai Anh
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 19

SPARC: Subspace Position-Aware Robust Few-Shot Calibration for Distribution-Shifted Industrial Anomaly Detection

SPARC is a few‑shot calibration technique for vision‑based industrial anomaly detectors that corrects deployment‑time nuisances by projecting patch features onto a per‑cell subspace, requiring only up to eight verified‑normal images and no gradient updates. It operates between the encoder and detector, using a closed‑form, spatially indexed estimate based on the encoder’s native patch grid. Across seven detectors on shift‑prone benchmarks, SPARC boosts pooled Image AUROC by 13.8 pp and AU‑PRO₀.₃ by 3.5 pp, while showing modest changes on benchmarks without engineered shift.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

Beyond Balanced Accuracy: A Resolution and Parity-Controlled Benchmark for Vision-Language and Vision-Only Defect Assessment in UAV Power-Line Inspection

The paper evaluates the claim that vision‑language models (VLMs) outperform task‑specific vision backbones for UAV power‑line defect assessment using the ElecVQA‑Bench benchmark. Across various evaluation settings—partitioning, item sets, label spaces, replication, resolution, and side information—the performance gap between VLMs and traditional backbones is minimal or even reversed when controlling for resolution and token budget. The study concludes that VLM superiority is not universally supported and emphasizes the importance of rigorous benchmark audits.

By Linghao Zhang, Siyu Xiang, Junwei Kuang, Peiyu Yi