arXiv:2605. 24251v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 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.
By Chad Weatherly, Sen Lin
In modern high-throughput industrial production lines, product configurations and visual characteristics frequently change, making it impractical to collect and annotate data for every new scenario. This dynamic setting makes Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) particularly suitable, as it enables defect detection without requiring training on target-specific samples.
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
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.
The paper identifies a problem in multi‑view anomaly detection called cross‑view information leakage, where fusing multiple inspection views can cause normal features to mask anomalies during reconstruction. To address this, the authors propose GLAD, a framework that uses a Global‑Local Attention Driven approach, combining vision foundation model features with two fusion modules: Multi‑view Merging Attention for local, weighted fusion and Object‑Guided Attention for global context aggregation. Experiments on Real‑IAD and MANTA‑Tiny demonstrate that GLAD outperforms existing methods across various metrics, underscoring the importance of restricting information flow to preserve the reconstruction gap.
By Shang-Fu Chen, Kuan-Chuan Peng, Jhih-Ciang Wu, Wen-Huang Cheng, Kai-Lung Hua
arXiv:2601. 22012v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting in continual learning is often measured at the performance or last-layer representation level, overlooking the underlying mechanisms.
By Sergi Masip, Gido M. van de Ven, Javier Ferrando, Tinne Tuytelaars