arXiv Machine Learning

Conformal calibration and look-elsewhere effect in anomaly detection for new-physics searches

arXiv:2606. 13780v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine-learned anomaly detection is reshaping searches for new physics, but it has outrun the statistics used to interpret it.

arXiv AI
Oct 12

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

The paper investigates anomaly detection in high-energy physics by learning low-dimensional representations of collision events. Using supervised and self-supervised neural embeddings on a large simulated dataset, the authors find that supervised objectives generally outperform self-supervised ones and improve signal efficiency compared to traditional kinematic-feature autoencoders. They also propose a local diagnostic pipeline that models the Standard Model latent space with a Gaussian Mixture Model, profiles components via high-level observables, and ranks these observables by their local discriminating power, thereby linking anomaly scores to specific kinematic features.

By Donatella Genovese, Philip Ploner, Simone Scardapane, Stefano Giagu, Thea Klaeboe Aarrestad
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
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
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 AI
Sep 4

Witnesses Explain Anomalies

WAND is an unsupervised tabular anomaly detector that scores each point by how far its projection on unit‑sphere directions deviates from a sub‑Gaussian baseline. The directions that flag a point serve as its explanation, providing per‑feature attribution at no extra cost and recoverable via gradients. On 47 ADBench datasets, WAND matches or exceeds 16 baselines in ROC‑AUC while delivering more accurate, faithful explanations than post‑hoc SHAP, LIME, or ECOD, all with linear scoring time and a probe‑efficiency guarantee.

By Lamine Diop
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 9

Prior-matched evaluation of operational Earth-observation classifiers: a three-number reporting method demonstrated on Sentinel-1 internal-wave detection

arXiv:2607. 07146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Internal Waves Service screens the Sentinel-1 Wave-mode archive for internal solitary waves, routing detections to experts whose adjudication time is the resource the effort exists to conserve.

By Joao Pinelo, Joao Goncalves, Arun Shukla, Adriana Santos-Ferreira
arXiv AI
Oct 1

TED:Text-Axis Evidence Decomposition for Prompted Anomaly Localization

The paper introduces TED (Text-Axis Evidence Decomposition), a post‑hoc scoring method that improves anomaly localization in CLIP‑based detectors without altering the backbone or prompts. TED evaluates whether ambiguous responses are better supported by defect patches or normal patches, thereby distinguishing true defects from visually complex normal regions. Experiments show that TED significantly enhances pixel‑level localization across frozen VLM backbones and adapted hosts, especially under hard‑false‑positive competition.

By JinYoung Kim, Geonho Kim, GiJeong Park, Geonu Lee, YoungJoon Yoo
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 5

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.

By Jos\'e Lucas De Melo Costa, Fabrice Popineau, Arpad Rimmel, Bich-Li\^en Doan