Unsupervised image anomaly detection (UAD) has become a critical process in industrial and medical applications, where models are trained on normal samples without requiring labeled anomalies. However, even normal images may contain sensitive product designs, manufacturing information, or institution-specific population characteristics, making centralized data collection difficult in practical deployments. Federated UAD provides a promising decentralized solution, but it remains challenging because clients use only normal training samples, their feature distributions remain highly heterogeneous within the same task, and communication should be efficient while limiting the exposure of sensitive client information. To address these challenges, we propose FedDyMem, an efficient federated learning method with dynamic memory and memory-reduce for unsupervised image anomaly detection. Instead of exchanging full model parameters, FedDyMem facilitates knowledge sharing between the clients and server through reduced dynamic memory banks. In the local clients, a memory generator and a metric loss are employed to improve the consistency of the feature distribution for normal samples, leveraging the local model to update the memory bank dynamically. For efficient communication and data privacy, a memory-reduce method based on weighted averages is proposed to significantly decrease the scale of memory banks. This representation reduces communication overhead and empirically lowers reconstruction fidelity under inversion attacks. On the server, global memory is constructed and distributed to individual clients through k-means aggregation. Experiments on six federated UAD tasks constructed from eleven public industrial and medical datasets show that FedDyMem consistently improves anomaly detection and localization while reducing communication cost.
Medical anomaly detection (AD) is crucial for early clinical intervention, yet it faces challenges due to limited access to high-quality medical imaging data, caused by privacy concerns and data silos. Few-shot learning has emerged as a promising approach to alleviate these limitations by leveraging the large-scale prior knowledge embedded in vision-language models (VLMs). Recent advancements in few-shot medical AD have treated normal and abnormal cases as a one-class classification problem, often overlooking the distinction among multiple anomaly categories. Thus, in this paper, we propose a framework tailored for few-shot medical anomaly detection in the scenario where the identification of multiple anomaly categories is required. To capture the detailed radiological signs of medical anomaly categories, our framework incorporates diverse textual descriptions for each category generated by a Large-Language model, under the assumption that different anomalies in medical images may share common radiological signs in each category. Specifically, we introduce SD-MAD, a two-stage Sign-Driven few-shot Multi-Anomaly Detection framework: (i) Radiological signs are aligned with anomaly categories by amplifying inter-anomaly discrepancy; (ii) Aligned signs are selected further to mitigate the effect of the under-fitting and uncertain-sample issue caused by limited medical data, employing an automatic sign selection strategy at inference. Moreover, we propose three protocols to comprehensively quantify the performance of multi-anomaly detection. Extensive experiments illustrate the effectiveness of our method.
Outlier detection in high-dimensional tabular data is challenging since data is often distributed across multiple lower-dimensional subspaces -- a phenomenon known as the Multiple Views effect (MV). This effect led to a large body of research focused on mining such subspaces, known as subspace selection. However, as the precise nature of the MV effect was not well understood, traditional methods had to rely on heuristic-driven search schemes that struggle to accurately capture the true structure of the data. Properly identifying these subspaces is critical for unsupervised tasks such as outlier detection or clustering, where misrepresenting the underlying data structure can hinder the performance. We introduce Myopic Subspace Theory (MST), a new theoretical framework that mathematically formulates the Multiple Views effect and writes subspace selection as a stochastic optimization problem. Based on MST, we introduce V-GAN, a generative method trained to solve such an optimization problem. This approach avoids any exhaustive search over the feature space while ensuring that the intrinsic data structure is preserved. Experiments on 42 real-world datasets show that using V-GAN subspaces to build ensemble methods leads to a significant increase in one-class classification performance -- compared to existing subspace selection, feature selection, and embedding methods. Further experiments on synthetic data show that V-GAN identifies subspaces more accurately while scaling better than other relevant subspace selection methods. These results confirm the theoretical guarantees of our approach and also highlight its practical viability in high-dimensional settings.
This article studies remote sensing image retrieval using kernel-based support vector data description (SVDD). We exploit deep SVDD, which is a well-known method for one-class classification to recover the most relevant samples from the archive. To this end, a deep neural network (DNN) is jointly trained to map the data into a hypersphere of minimum volume in the latent space. It is expected that similar samples to the query are compressed inside of the hypersphere. The closest embedding to the center of the hypersphere is related to the most relevant sample to query. We enhance deep SVDD by injecting the statistical information of data to the DNN by means of additional terms in the cost function. The first enhancement method takes advantage of covariance regularization of batches of the training set to penalize unnecessary redundancy and minimize the correlation between the different dimensions of the embedding. The second method involves unlocking the hypersphere's predefined center while preventing network divergence during training. Therefore, two parameters are designed to control the importance of the drifting of the center and the importance of a fixed predefined center (convergence), respectively. This has been implemented by considering the average of batches of embedding in each iteration as the updated center. This pushes irrelevant samples away from query samples, making data clustering easier for the DNN. The performance of the proposed methods is evaluated on benchmark datasets.
The accumulation of time-series signals and the absence of labels make time-series Anomaly Detection (AD) a self-supervised task of deep learning. Methods based on normality assumptions face the following three limitations: (1) A single assumption could hardly characterize the whole normality or lead to some deviation. (2) Some assumptions may go against the principle of AD. (3) Their basic assumption is that the training data is uncontaminated (free of anomalies), which is unrealistic in practice, leading to a decline in robustness. This paper proposes a novel robust approach, RoCA, which is the first to address all of the above three challenges, as far as we are aware. It fuses the separated assumptions of one-class classification and contrastive learning in a single training process to characterize a more complete so-called normality. Additionally, it monitors the training data and computes a carefully designed anomaly score throughout the training process. This score helps identify latent anomalies, which are then used to define the classification boundary, inspired by the concept of outlier exposure. The performance on AIOps datasets improved by 6% compared to when contamination was not considered (COCA). On two large and high-dimensional multivariate datasets, the performance increased by 5% to 10%. RoCA achieves the highest average performance on both univariate and multivariate datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/ruiking04/RoCA.
For the first time, we unveil discernible temporal (or historical) trajectory imprints resulting from adversarial example (AE) attacks. Standing in contrast to existing studies all focusing on spatial (or static) imprints within the targeted underlying victim models, we present a fresh temporal paradigm for understanding these attacks. Of paramount discovery is that these imprints are encapsulated within a single loss metric, spanning universally across diverse tasks such as classification and regression, and modalities including image, text, and audio. Recognizing the distinct nature of loss between adversarial and clean examples, we exploit this temporal imprint for AE detection by proposing TRAIT (TRaceable Adversarial temporal trajectory ImprinTs). TRAIT operates under minimal assumptions without prior knowledge of attacks, thereby framing the detection challenge as a one-class classification problem. However, detecting AEs is still challenged by significant overlaps between the constructed synthetic losses of adversarial and clean examples due to the absence of ground truth for incoming inputs. TRAIT addresses this challenge by converting the synthetic loss into a spectrum signature, using the technique of Fast Fourier Transform to highlight the discrepancies, drawing inspiration from the temporal nature of the imprints, analogous to time-series signals. Across 12 AE attacks including SMACK (USENIX Sec'2023), TRAIT demonstrates consistent outstanding performance across comprehensively evaluated modalities, tasks, datasets, and model architectures. In all scenarios, TRAIT achieves an AE detection accuracy exceeding 97%, often around 99%, while maintaining a false rejection rate of 1%. TRAIT remains effective under the formulated strong adaptive attacks.
In this paper, we address an anomaly detection problem in smart power grids using Multimodal Subspace Support Vector Data Description (MS-SVDD). This approach aims to leverage better feature relations by considering the data as coming from different modalities. These data are projected into a shared lower-dimensionality subspace which aims to preserve their inner characteristics. To supplement the previous work on this subject, we introduce novel multimodal graph-embedded regularizers that leverage graph information for every modality to enhance the training process, and we consider an improved training equation that allows us to maximize or minimize each modality according to the specified criteria. We apply this regularized graph-embedded model on a 3-modalities dataset after having generalized MS-SVDD algorithms to any number of modalities. To set up our application, we propose a whole preprocessing procedure to extract One-Class Classification training instances from time-bounded event time series that are used to evaluate both the reliability and earliness of our model for Event Detection.
Restricted kernel machines (RKMs) have demonstrated a significant impact in enhancing generalization ability in the field of machine learning. Recent studies have introduced various methods within the RKM framework, combining kernel functions with the least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) in a manner similar to the energy function of restricted boltzmann machines (RBM), such that a better performance can be achieved. However, RKM's efficacy can be compromised by the presence of outliers and other forms of contamination within the dataset. These anomalies can skew the learning process, leading to less accurate and reliable outcomes. To address this critical issue and to ensure the robustness of the model, we propose the novel one-class RKM (OCRKM). In the framework of OCRKM, we employ an energy function akin to that of the RBM, which integrates both visible and hidden variables in a nonprobabilistic setting. The formulation of the proposed OCRKM facilitates the seamless integration of one-class classification method with the RKM, enhancing its capability to detect outliers and anomalies effectively. The proposed OCRKM model is evaluated over UCI benchmark datasets. Experimental findings and statistical analyses consistently emphasize the superior generalization capabilities of the proposed OCRKM model over baseline models across all scenarios.
In out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, one is asked to classify whether a test sample comes from a known inlier distribution or not. We focus on the case where the inlier distribution is defined by a training dataset and there exists no additional knowledge about the novelties that one is likely to encounter. This problem is also referred to as novelty detection, one-class classification, and unsupervised anomaly detection. The current literature suggests that contrastive learning techniques are state-of-the-art for OOD detection. We aim to improve on those techniques by combining/ensembling their scores using the framework of null hypothesis testing and, in particular, a novel generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT). We demonstrate that our proposed GLRT-based technique outperforms the state-of-the-art CSI and SupCSI techniques from Tack et al. 2020 in dataset-vs-dataset experiments with CIFAR-10, SVHN, LSUN, ImageNet, and CIFAR-100, as well as leave-one-class-out experiments with CIFAR-10. We also demonstrate that our GLRT outperforms the score-combining methods of Fisher, Bonferroni, Simes, Benjamini-Hochwald, and Stouffer in our application.
Visual anomaly detection is a highly challenging task, often categorized as a one-class classification and segmentation problem. Recent studies have demonstrated that the student-teacher (S-T) framework effectively addresses this challenge. However, most S-T frameworks rely solely on pre-trained teacher networks to guide student networks in learning multi-scale similar features, overlooking the potential of the student networks to enhance learning through multi-scale feature fusion. In this study, we propose a novel model named PFADSeg, which integrates a pre-trained teacher network, a denoising student network with multi-scale feature fusion, and a guided anomaly segmentation network into a unified framework. By adopting a unique teacher-encoder and student-decoder denoising mode, the model improves the student network's ability to learn from teacher network features. Furthermore, an adaptive feature fusion mechanism is introduced to train a self-supervised segmentation network that synthesizes anomaly masks autonomously, significantly increasing detection performance. Evaluated on the MVTec AD dataset, PFADSeg achieves state-of-the-art results with an image-level AUC of 98.9%, a pixel-level mean precision of 76.4%, and an instance-level mean precision of 78.7%.
The Benjamini-Hochberg (BH) procedure is widely used to control the false detection rate (FDR) in multiple testing. Applications of this control abound in drug discovery, forensics, anomaly detection, and, in particular, machine learning, ranging from nonparametric outlier detection to out-of-distribution detection and one-class classification methods. Considering this control could be relied upon in critical safety/security contexts, we investigate its adversarial robustness. More precisely, we study under what conditions BH does and does not exhibit adversarial robustness, we present a class of simple and easily implementable adversarial test-perturbation algorithms, and we perform computational experiments. With our algorithms, we demonstrate that there are conditions under which BH's control can be significantly broken with relatively few (even just one) test score perturbation(s), and provide non-asymptotic guarantees on the expected adversarial-adjustment to FDR. Our technical analysis involves a combinatorial reframing of the BH procedure as a ``balls into bins'' process, and drawing a connection to generalized ballot problems to facilitate an information-theoretic approach for deriving non-asymptotic lower bounds.
The detection of anomalous tissue regions (ATRs) within affected tissues is crucial in clinical diagnosis and pathological studies. Conventional automated ATR detection methods, primarily based on histology images alone, falter in cases where ATRs and normal tissues have subtle visual differences. The recent spatial transcriptomics (ST) technology profiles gene expressions across tissue regions, offering a molecular perspective for detecting ATRs. However, there is a dearth of ATR detection methods that effectively harness complementary information from both histology images and ST. To address this gap, we propose MEATRD, a novel ATR detection method that integrates histology image and ST data. MEATRD is trained to reconstruct image patches and gene expression profiles of normal tissue spots (inliers) from their multimodal embeddings, followed by learning a one-class classification AD model based on latent multimodal reconstruction errors. This strategy harmonizes the strengths of reconstruction-based and one-class classification approaches. At the heart of MEATRD is an innovative masked graph dual-attention transformer (MGDAT) network, which not only facilitates cross-modality and cross-node information sharing but also addresses the model over-generalization issue commonly seen in reconstruction-based AD methods. Additionally, we demonstrate that modality-specific, task-relevant information is collated and condensed in multimodal bottleneck encoding generated in MGDAT, marking the first theoretical analysis of the informational properties of multimodal bottleneck encoding. Extensive evaluations across eight real ST datasets reveal MEATRD's superior performance in ATR detection, surpassing various state-of-the-art AD methods. Remarkably, MEATRD also proves adept at discerning ATRs that only show slight visual deviations from normal tissues.
While the mainstream research in anomaly detection has mainly followed the one-class classification, practical industrial environments often incur noisy training data due to annotation errors or lack of labels for new or refurbished products. To address these issues, we propose a novel learning-based approach for fully unsupervised anomaly detection with unlabeled and potentially contaminated training data. Our method is motivated by two observations, that i) the pairwise feature distances between the normal samples are on average likely to be smaller than those between the anomaly samples or heterogeneous samples and ii) pairs of features mutually closest to each other are likely to be homogeneous pairs, which hold if the normal data has smaller variance than the anomaly data. Building on the first observation that nearest-neighbor distances can distinguish between confident normal samples and anomalies, we propose a pseudo-labeling strategy using an iteratively reconstructed memory bank (IRMB). The second observation is utilized as a new loss function to promote class-homogeneity between mutually closest pairs thereby reducing the ill-posedness of the task. Experimental results on two public industrial anomaly benchmarks and semantic anomaly examples validate the effectiveness of FUN-AD across different scenarios and anomaly-to-normal ratios. Our code is available at https://github.com/HY-Vision-Lab/FUNAD.
Tabular anomaly detection under the one-class classification setting poses a significant challenge, as it involves accurately conceptualizing "normal" derived exclusively from a single category to discern anomalies from normal data variations. Capturing the intrinsic correlation among attributes within normal samples presents one promising method for learning the concept. To do so, the most recent effort relies on a learnable mask strategy with a reconstruction task. However, this wisdom may suffer from the risk of producing uniform masks, i.e., essentially nothing is masked, leading to less effective correlation learning. To address this issue, we presume that attributes related to others in normal samples can be divided into two non-overlapping and correlated subsets, defined as CorrSets, to capture the intrinsic correlation effectively. Accordingly, we introduce an innovative method that disentangles CorrSets from normal tabular data. To our knowledge, this is a pioneering effort to apply the concept of disentanglement for one-class anomaly detection on tabular data. Extensive experiments on 20 tabular datasets show that our method substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and leads to an average performance improvement of 6.1% on AUC-PR and 2.1% on AUC-ROC. Codes are available at https://github.com/yjnanan/Disent-AD.
We propose an effective unsupervised 3D point cloud novelty detection approach, leveraging a general point cloud feature extractor and a one-class classifier. The general feature extractor consists of a graph-based autoencoder and is trained once on a point cloud dataset such as a mathematically generated fractal 3D point cloud dataset that is independent of normal/abnormal categories. The input point clouds are first converted into latent vectors by the general feature extractor, and then one-class classification is performed on the latent vectors. Compared to existing methods measuring the reconstruction error in 3D coordinate space, our approach utilizes latent representations where the shape information is condensed, which allows more direct and effective novelty detection. We confirm that our general feature extractor can extract shape features of unseen categories, eliminating the need for autoencoder re-training and reducing the computational burden. We validate the performance of our method through experiments on several subsets of the ShapeNet dataset and demonstrate that our latent-based approach outperforms the existing methods.
Anomaly Detection is an important problem within computer vision, having variety of real-life applications. Yet, the current set of solutions to this problem entail known, systematic shortcomings. Specifically, contemporary surface Anomaly Detection task assumes the presence of multiple specific anomaly classes e.g. cracks, rusting etc., unlike one-class classification model of past. However, building a deep learning model in such setup remains a challenge because anomalies arise rarely, and hence anomaly samples are quite scarce. Transfer learning has been a preferred paradigm in such situations. But the typical source domains with large dataset sizes e.g. ImageNet, JFT-300M, LAION-2B do not correlate well with the domain of surfaces and materials, an important premise of transfer learning. In this paper, we make an important hypothesis and show, by exhaustive experimentation, that the space of anomaly-free visual patterns of the normal samples correlates well with each of the various spaces of anomalous patterns of the class-specific anomaly samples. The first results of using this hypothesis in transfer learning have indeed been quite encouraging. We expect that finding such a simple closeby domain that readily entails large number of samples, and which also oftentimes shows interclass separability though with narrow margins, will be a useful discovery. Especially, it is expected to improve domain adaptation for anomaly detection, and few-shot learning for anomaly detection, making in-the-wild anomaly detection realistically possible in future.
This paper proposes an easy-to-use method for one-class classification: Repeated Element-wise Folding (REF). The algorithm consists of repeatedly standardizing and applying an element-wise folding operation on the one-class training data. Equivalent mappings are performed on unknown test items and the classification prediction is based on the item's distance to the origin of the final distribution. As all the included operations have linear time complexity, the proposed algorithm provides a linear-time alternative for the commonly used computationally much more demanding approaches. Furthermore, REF can avoid the challenges of hyperparameter setting in one-class classification by providing robust default settings. The experiments show that the proposed method can produce similar classification performance or even outperform the more complex algorithms on various benchmark datasets. Matlab codes for REF are publicly available at https://github.com/JenniRaitoharju/REF.
The robustness of machine learning models has been questioned by the existence of adversarial examples. We examine the threat of adversarial examples in practical applications that require lightweight models for one-class classification. Building on Ilyas et al. (2019), we investigate the vulnerability of lightweight one-class classifiers to adversarial attacks and possible reasons for it. Our results show that lightweight one-class classifiers learn features that are not robust (e.g. texture) under stronger attacks. However, unlike in multi-class classification (Ilyas et al., 2019), these non-robust features are not always useful for the one-class task, suggesting that learning these unpredictive and non-robust features is an unwanted consequence of training.
The delineation of tumor target and organs-at-risk is critical in the radiotherapy treatment planning. Automatic segmentation can be used to reduce the physician workload and improve the consistency. However, the quality assurance of the automatic segmentation is still an unmet need in clinical practice. The patient data used in our study was a standardized dataset from AAPM Thoracic Auto-Segmentation Challenge. The OARs included were left and right lungs, heart, esophagus, and spinal cord. Two groups of OARs were generated, the benchmark dataset manually contoured by experienced physicians and the test dataset automatically created using a software AccuContour. A resnet-152 network was performed as feature extractor, and one-class support vector classifier was used to determine the high or low quality. We evaluate the model performance with balanced accuracy, F-score, sensitivity, specificity and the area under the receiving operator characteristic curve. We randomly generated contour errors to assess the generalization of our method, explored the detection limit, and evaluated the correlations between detection limit and various metrics such as volume, Dice similarity coefficient, Hausdorff distance, and mean surface distance. The proposed one-class classifier outperformed in metrics such as balanced accuracy, AUC, and others. The proposed method showed significant improvement over binary classifiers in handling various types of errors. Our proposed model, which introduces residual network and attention mechanism in the one-class classification framework, was able to detect the various types of OAR contour errors with high accuracy. The proposed method can significantly reduce the burden of physician review for contour delineation.
5G mobile networks are vulnerable to jamming attacks that may jeopardize valuable applications such as industry automation. In this paper, we propose to analyze radio signals with a dedicated device to detect jamming attacks. We pursue a learning approach, with the detector being a CNN implementing a GLRT. To this end, the CNN is trained as a two-class classifier using two datasets: one of real legitimate signals and another generated artificially so that the resulting classifier implements the GLRT. The artificial dataset is generated mimicking different types of jamming signals. We evaluate the performance of this detector using experimental data obtained from a private 5G network and several jamming signals, showing the technique's effectiveness in detecting the attacks.