This paper explores the problem of Generalist Anomaly Detection (GAD), aiming to train one single detection model that can generalize to detect anomalies in diverse datasets from different application domains without any further training on the target data. Some recent studies have shown that large pre-trained Visual-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have strong generalization capabilities on detecting industrial defects from various datasets, but their methods rely heavily on handcrafted text prompts about defects, making them difficult to generalize to anomalies in other applications, e.g., medical image anomalies or semantic anomalies in natural images. In this work, we propose to train a GAD model with few-shot normal images as sample prompts for AD on diverse datasets on the fly. To this end, we introduce a novel approach that learns an in-context residual learning model for GAD, termed InCTRL. It is trained on an auxiliary dataset to discriminate anomalies from normal samples based on a holistic evaluation of the residuals between query images and few-shot normal sample prompts. Regardless of the datasets, per definition of anomaly, larger residuals are expected for anomalies than normal samples, thereby enabling InCTRL to generalize across different domains without further training. Comprehensive experiments on nine AD datasets are performed to establish a GAD benchmark that encapsulate the detection of industrial defect anomalies, medical anomalies, and semantic anomalies in both one-vs-all and multi-class setting, on which InCTRL is the best performer and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art competing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/InCTRL.
This paper explores the problem of continual learning (CL) of vision-language models (VLMs) in open domains, where the models need to perform continual updating and inference on a streaming of datasets from diverse seen and unseen domains with novel classes. Such a capability is crucial for various applications in open environments, e.g., AI assistants, autonomous driving systems, and robotics. Current CL studies mostly focus on closed-set scenarios in a single domain with known classes. Large pre-trained VLMs like CLIP have demonstrated superior zero-shot recognition ability, and a number of recent studies leverage this ability to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in CL, but they focus on closed-set CL in a single domain dataset. Open-domain CL of large VLMs is significantly more challenging due to 1) large class correlations and domain gaps across the datasets and 2) the forgetting of zero-shot knowledge in the pre-trained VLMs in addition to the knowledge learned from the newly adapted datasets. In this work we introduce a novel approach, termed CoLeCLIP, that learns an open-domain CL model based on CLIP. It addresses these challenges by a joint learning of a set of task prompts and a cross-domain class vocabulary. Extensive experiments on 11 domain datasets show that CoLeCLIP outperforms state-of-the-art methods for open-domain CL under both task- and class-incremental learning settings.
This work considers a practical semi-supervised graph anomaly detection (GAD) scenario, where part of the nodes in a graph are known to be normal, contrasting to the unsupervised setting in most GAD studies with a fully unlabeled graph. As expected, we find that having access to these normal nodes helps enhance the detection performance of existing unsupervised GAD methods when they are adapted to the semi-supervised setting. However, their utilization of these normal nodes is limited. In this paper, we propose a novel Generative GAD approach (GGAD) for the semi-supervised scenario to better exploit the normal nodes. The key idea is to generate outlier nodes that assimilate anomaly nodes in both local structure and node representations for providing effective negative node samples in training a discriminative one-class classifier. There have been many generative anomaly detection approaches, but they are designed for non-graph data, and as a result, they fail to take account of the graph structure information. Our approach tackles this problem by generating graph structure-aware outlier nodes that have asymmetric affinity separability from normal nodes while being enforced to achieve egocentric closeness to normal nodes in the node representation space. Comprehensive experiments on four real-world datasets are performed to establish a benchmark for semi-supervised GAD and show that GGAD substantially outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised and semi-supervised GAD methods with varying numbers of training normal nodes. Code will be made available at https://github.com/mala-lab/GGAD.
Visual Anomaly Detection (VAD) endeavors to pinpoint deviations from the concept of normality in visual data, widely applied across diverse domains, e.g., industrial defect inspection, and medical lesion detection. This survey comprehensively examines recent advancements in VAD by identifying three primary challenges: 1) scarcity of training data, 2) diversity of visual modalities, and 3) complexity of hierarchical anomalies. Starting with a brief overview of the VAD background and its generic concept definitions, we progressively categorize, emphasize, and discuss the latest VAD progress from the perspective of sample number, data modality, and anomaly hierarchy. Through an in-depth analysis of the VAD field, we finally summarize future developments for VAD and conclude the key findings and contributions of this survey.
Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) aims to detect novel objects beyond a given set of base categories on which the detection model is trained. Recent OVOD methods focus on adapting the image-level pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, to a region-level object detection task via, eg., region-level knowledge distillation, regional prompt learning, or region-text pre-training, to expand the detection vocabulary. These methods have demonstrated remarkable performance in recognizing regional visual concepts, but they are weak in exploiting the VLMs' powerful global scene understanding ability learned from the billion-scale image-level text descriptions. This limits their capability in detecting hard objects of small, blurred, or occluded appearance from novel/base categories, whose detection heavily relies on contextual information. To address this, we propose a novel approach, namely Simple Image-level Classification for Context-Aware Detection Scoring (SIC-CADS), to leverage the superior global knowledge yielded from CLIP for complementing the current OVOD models from a global perspective. The core of SIC-CADS is a multi-modal multi-label recognition (MLR) module that learns the object co-occurrence-based contextual information from CLIP to recognize all possible object categories in the scene. These image-level MLR scores can then be utilized to refine the instance-level detection scores of the current OVOD models in detecting those hard objects. This is verified by extensive empirical results on two popular benchmarks, OV-LVIS and OV-COCO, which show that SIC-CADS achieves significant and consistent improvement when combined with different types of OVOD models. Further, SIC-CADS also improves the cross-dataset generalization ability on Objects365 and OpenImages. The code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/SIC-CADS.
Existing out-of-distribution (OOD) methods have shown great success on balanced datasets but become ineffective in long-tailed recognition (LTR) scenarios where 1) OOD samples are often wrongly classified into head classes and/or 2) tail-class samples are treated as OOD samples. To address these issues, current studies fit a prior distribution of auxiliary/pseudo OOD data to the long-tailed in-distribution (ID) data. However, it is difficult to obtain such an accurate prior distribution given the unknowingness of real OOD samples and heavy class imbalance in LTR. A straightforward solution to avoid the requirement of this prior is to learn an outlier class to encapsulate the OOD samples. The main challenge is then to tackle the aforementioned confusion between OOD samples and head/tail-class samples when learning the outlier class. To this end, we introduce a novel calibrated outlier class learning (COCL) approach, in which 1) a debiased large margin learning method is introduced in the outlier class learning to distinguish OOD samples from both head and tail classes in the representation space and 2) an outlier-class-aware logit calibration method is defined to enhance the long-tailed classification confidence. Extensive empirical results on three popular benchmarks CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, and ImageNet-LT demonstrate that COCL substantially outperforms state-of-the-art OOD detection methods in LTR while being able to improve the classification accuracy on ID data. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/COCL.
The ongoing challenges in time series anomaly detection (TSAD), notably the scarcity of anomaly labels and the variability in anomaly lengths and shapes, have led to the need for a more efficient solution. As limited anomaly labels hinder traditional supervised models in TSAD, various SOTA deep learning techniques, such as self-supervised learning, have been introduced to tackle this issue. However, they encounter difficulties handling variations in anomaly lengths and shapes, limiting their adaptability to diverse anomalies. Additionally, many benchmark datasets suffer from the problem of having explicit anomalies that even random functions can detect. This problem is exacerbated by ill-posed evaluation metrics, known as point adjustment (PA), which can result in inflated model performance. In this context, we propose a novel self-supervised learning based Tri-domain Anomaly Detector (TriAD), which addresses these challenges by modeling features across three data domains - temporal, frequency, and residual domains - without relying on anomaly labels. Unlike traditional contrastive learning methods, TriAD employs both inter-domain and intra-domain contrastive loss to learn common attributes among normal data and differentiate them from anomalies. Additionally, our approach can detect anomalies of varying lengths by integrating with a discord discovery algorithm. It is worth noting that this study is the first to reevaluate the deep learning potential in TSAD, utilizing both rigorously designed datasets (i.e., UCR Archive) and evaluation metrics (i.e., PA%K and affiliation). Through experimental results on the UCR dataset, TriAD achieves an impressive three-fold increase in PA%K based F1 scores over SOTA deep learning models, and 50% increase of accuracy as compared to SOTA discord discovery algorithms.
The ongoing challenges in time series anomaly detection (TSAD), notably the scarcity of anomaly labels and the variability in anomaly lengths and shapes, have led to the need for a more efficient solution. As limited anomaly labels hinder traditional supervised models in TSAD, various SOTA deep learning techniques, such as self-supervised learning, have been introduced to tackle this issue. However, they encounter difficulties handling variations in anomaly lengths and shapes, limiting their adaptability to diverse anomalies. Additionally, many benchmark datasets suffer from the problem of having explicit anomalies that even random functions can detect. This problem is exacerbated by ill-posed evaluation metrics, known as point adjustment (PA), which can result in inflated model performance. In this context, we propose a novel self-supervised learning based Tri-domain Anomaly Detector (TriAD), which addresses these challenges by modeling features across three data domains - temporal, frequency, and residual domains - without relying on anomaly labels. Unlike traditional contrastive learning methods, TriAD employs both inter-domain and intra-domain contrastive loss to learn common attributes among normal data and differentiate them from anomalies. Additionally, our approach can detect anomalies of varying lengths by integrating with a discord discovery algorithm. It is worth noting that this study is the first to reevaluate the deep learning potential in TSAD, utilizing both rigorously designed datasets (i.e., UCR Archive) and evaluation metrics (i.e., PA%K and affiliation). Through experimental results on the UCR dataset, TriAD achieves an impressive three-fold increase in PA%K based F1 scores over SOTA deep learning models, and 50% increase of accuracy as compared to SOTA discord discovery algorithms.
Video anomaly detection (VAD) with weak supervision has achieved remarkable performance in utilizing video-level labels to discriminate whether a video frame is normal or abnormal. However, current approaches are inherently limited to a closed-set setting and may struggle in open-world applications where there can be anomaly categories in the test data unseen during training. A few recent studies attempt to tackle a more realistic setting, open-set VAD, which aims to detect unseen anomalies given seen anomalies and normal videos. However, such a setting focuses on predicting frame anomaly scores, having no ability to recognize the specific categories of anomalies, despite the fact that this ability is essential for building more informed video surveillance systems. This paper takes a step further and explores open-vocabulary video anomaly detection (OVVAD), in which we aim to leverage pre-trained large models to detect and categorize seen and unseen anomalies. To this end, we propose a model that decouples OVVAD into two mutually complementary tasks -- class-agnostic detection and class-specific classification -- and jointly optimizes both tasks. Particularly, we devise a semantic knowledge injection module to introduce semantic knowledge from large language models for the detection task, and design a novel anomaly synthesis module to generate pseudo unseen anomaly videos with the help of large vision generation models for the classification task. These semantic knowledge and synthesis anomalies substantially extend our model's capability in detecting and categorizing a variety of seen and unseen anomalies. Extensive experiments on three widely-used benchmarks demonstrate our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on OVVAD task.