Adaptive Deviation Learning for Visual Anomaly Detection with Data Contamination

Visual anomaly detection targets to detect images that notably differ from normal pattern, and it has found extensive application in identifying defective parts within the manufacturing industry. These anomaly detection paradigms predominantly focus on training detection models using only clean, unlabeled normal samples, assuming an absence of contamination; a condition often unmet in real-world scenarios. The performance of these methods significantly depends on the quality of the data and usually decreases when exposed to noise. We introduce a systematic adaptive method that employs deviation learning to compute anomaly scores end-to-end while addressing data contamination by assigning relative importance to the weights of individual instances. In this approach, the anomaly scores for normal instances are designed to approximate scalar scores obtained from the known prior distribution. Meanwhile, anomaly scores for anomaly examples are adjusted to exhibit statistically significant deviations from these reference scores. Our approach incorporates a constrained optimization problem within the deviation learning framework to update instance weights, resolving this problem for each mini-batch. Comprehensive experiments on the MVTec and VisA benchmark datasets indicate that our proposed method surpasses competing techniques and exhibits both stability and robustness in the presence of data contamination.

Long-Tailed Out-of-Distribution Detection via Normalized Outlier Distribution Adaptation

One key challenge in Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection is the absence of ground-truth OOD samples during training. One principled approach to address this issue is to use samples from external datasets as outliers (i.e., pseudo OOD samples) to train OOD detectors. However, we find empirically that the outlier samples often present a distribution shift compared to the true OOD samples, especially in Long-Tailed Recognition (LTR) scenarios, where ID classes are heavily imbalanced, \ie, the true OOD samples exhibit very different probability distribution to the head and tailed ID classes from the outliers. In this work, we propose a novel approach, namely normalized outlier distribution adaptation (AdaptOD), to tackle this distribution shift problem. One of its key components is dynamic outlier distribution adaptation that effectively adapts a vanilla outlier distribution based on the outlier samples to the true OOD distribution by utilizing the OOD knowledge in the predicted OOD samples during inference. Further, to obtain a more reliable set of predicted OOD samples on long-tailed ID data, a novel dual-normalized energy loss is introduced in AdaptOD, which leverages class- and sample-wise normalized energy to enforce a more balanced prediction energy on imbalanced ID samples. This helps avoid bias toward the head samples and learn a substantially better vanilla outlier distribution than existing energy losses during training. It also eliminates the need of manually tuning the sensitive margin hyperparameters in energy losses. Empirical results on three popular benchmarks for OOD detection in LTR show the superior performance of AdaptOD over state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/mala-lab/AdaptOD}.

Zero-shot Generalist Graph Anomaly Detection with Unified Neighborhood Prompts

Graph anomaly detection (GAD), which aims to identify nodes in a graph that significantly deviate from normal patterns, plays a crucial role in broad application domains. Existing GAD methods, whether supervised or unsupervised, are one-model-for-one-dataset approaches, i.e., training a separate model for each graph dataset. This limits their applicability in real-world scenarios where training on the target graph data is not possible due to issues like data privacy. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel zero-shot generalist GAD approach UNPrompt that trains a one-for-all detection model, requiring the training of one GAD model on a single graph dataset and then effectively generalizing to detect anomalies in other graph datasets without any retraining or fine-tuning. The key insight in UNPrompt is that i) the predictability of latent node attributes can serve as a generalized anomaly measure and ii) highly generalized normal and abnormal graph patterns can be learned via latent node attribute prediction in a properly normalized node attribute space. UNPrompt achieves generalist GAD through two main modules: one module aligns the dimensionality and semantics of node attributes across different graphs via coordinate-wise normalization in a projected space, while another module learns generalized neighborhood prompts that support the use of latent node attribute predictability as an anomaly score across different datasets. Extensive experiments on real-world GAD datasets show that UNPrompt significantly outperforms diverse competing methods under the generalist GAD setting, and it also has strong superiority under the one-model-for-one-dataset setting.

Abnormality Forecasting: Time Series Anomaly Prediction via Future Context Modeling

Identifying anomalies from time series data plays an important role in various fields such as infrastructure security, intelligent operation and maintenance, and space exploration. Current research focuses on detecting the anomalies after they occur, which can lead to significant financial/reputation loss or infrastructure damage. In this work we instead study a more practical yet very challenging problem, time series anomaly prediction, aiming at providing early warnings for abnormal events before their occurrence. To tackle this problem, we introduce a novel principled approach, namely future context modeling (FCM). Its key insight is that the future abnormal events in a target window can be accurately predicted if their preceding observation window exhibits any subtle difference to normal data. To effectively capture such differences, FCM first leverages long-term forecasting models to generate a discriminative future context based on the observation data, aiming to amplify those subtle but unusual difference. It then models a normality correlation of the observation data with the forecasting future context to complement the normality modeling of the observation data in foreseeing possible abnormality in the target window. A joint variate-time attention learning is also introduced in FCM to leverage both temporal signals and features of the time series data for more discriminative normality modeling in the aforementioned two views. Comprehensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that FCM gains good recall rate (70\%+) on multiple datasets and significantly outperforms all baselines in F1 score. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/FCM.

Fine-grained Abnormality Prompt Learning for Zero-shot Anomaly Detection

Current zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) methods show remarkable success in prompting large pre-trained vision-language models to detect anomalies in a target dataset without using any dataset-specific training or demonstration. However, these methods are often focused on crafting/learning prompts that capture only coarse-grained semantics of abnormality, e.g., high-level semantics like "damaged", "imperfect", or "defective" on carpet. They therefore have limited capability in recognizing diverse abnormality details with distinctive visual appearance, e.g., specific defect types like color stains, cuts, holes, and threads on carpet. To address this limitation, we propose FAPrompt, a novel framework designed to learn Fine-grained Abnormality Prompts for more accurate ZSAD. To this end, we introduce a novel compound abnormality prompting module in FAPrompt to learn a set of complementary, decomposed abnormality prompts, where each abnormality prompt is formed by a compound of shared normal tokens and a few learnable abnormal tokens. On the other hand, the fine-grained abnormality patterns can be very different from one dataset to another. To enhance their cross-dataset generalization, we further introduce a data-dependent abnormality prior module that learns to derive abnormality features from each query/test image as a sample-wise abnormality prior to ground the abnormality prompts in a given target dataset. Comprehensive experiments conducted across 19 real-world datasets, covering both industrial defects and medical anomalies, demonstrate that FAPrompt substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods by at least 3%-5% AUC/AP in both image- and pixel-level ZSAD tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/FAPrompt.

Replay-and-Forget-Free Graph Class-Incremental Learning: A Task Profiling and Prompting Approach

Class-incremental learning (CIL) aims to continually learn a sequence of tasks, with each task consisting of a set of unique classes. Graph CIL (GCIL) follows the same setting but needs to deal with graph tasks (e.g., node classification in a graph). The key characteristic of CIL lies in the absence of task identifiers (IDs) during inference, which causes a significant challenge in separating classes from different tasks (i.e., inter-task class separation). Being able to accurately predict the task IDs can help address this issue, but it is a challenging problem. In this paper, we show theoretically that accurate task ID prediction on graph data can be achieved by a Laplacian smoothing-based graph task profiling approach, in which each graph task is modeled by a task prototype based on Laplacian smoothing over the graph. It guarantees that the task prototypes of the same graph task are nearly the same with a large smoothing step, while those of different tasks are distinct due to differences in graph structure and node attributes. Further, to avoid the catastrophic forgetting of the knowledge learned in previous graph tasks, we propose a novel graph prompting approach for GCIL which learns a small discriminative graph prompt for each task, essentially resulting in a separate classification model for each task. The prompt learning requires the training of a single graph neural network (GNN) only once on the first task, and no data replay is required thereafter, thereby obtaining a GCIL model being both replay-free and forget-free. Extensive experiments on four GCIL benchmarks show that i) our task prototype-based method can achieve 100% task ID prediction accuracy on all four datasets, ii) our GCIL model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art competing methods by at least 18% in average CIL accuracy, and iii) our model is fully free of forgetting on the four datasets.

Deep Graph Anomaly Detection: A Survey and New Perspectives

Graph anomaly detection (GAD), which aims to identify unusual graph instances (nodes, edges, subgraphs, or graphs), has attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its significance in a wide range of applications. Deep learning approaches, graph neural networks (GNNs) in particular, have been emerging as a promising paradigm for GAD, owing to its strong capability in capturing complex structure and/or node attributes in graph data. Considering the large number of methods proposed for GNN-based GAD, it is of paramount importance to summarize the methodologies and findings in the existing GAD studies, so that we can pinpoint effective model designs for tackling open GAD problems. To this end, in this work we aim to present a comprehensive review of deep learning approaches for GAD. Existing GAD surveys are focused on task-specific discussions, making it difficult to understand the technical insights of existing methods and their limitations in addressing some unique challenges in GAD. To fill this gap, we first discuss the problem complexities and their resulting challenges in GAD, and then provide a systematic review of current deep GAD methods from three novel perspectives of methodology, including GNN backbone design, proxy task design for GAD, and graph anomaly measures. To deepen the discussions, we further propose a taxonomy of 13 fine-grained method categories under these three perspectives to provide more in-depth insights into the model designs and their capabilities. To facilitate the experiments and validation, we also summarize a collection of widely-used GAD datasets and empirical comparison. We further discuss multiple open problems to inspire more future high-quality research. A continuously updated repository for datasets, links to the codes of algorithms, and empirical comparison is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/Awesome-Deep-Graph-Anomaly-Detection.

Deep Learning for Video Anomaly Detection: A Review

Video anomaly detection (VAD) aims to discover behaviors or events deviating from the normality in videos. As a long-standing task in the field of computer vision, VAD has witnessed much good progress. In the era of deep learning, with the explosion of architectures of continuously growing capability and capacity, a great variety of deep learning based methods are constantly emerging for the VAD task, greatly improving the generalization ability of detection algorithms and broadening the application scenarios. Therefore, such a multitude of methods and a large body of literature make a comprehensive survey a pressing necessity. In this paper, we present an extensive and comprehensive research review, covering the spectrum of five different categories, namely, semi-supervised, weakly supervised, fully supervised, unsupervised and open-set supervised VAD, and we also delve into the latest VAD works based on pre-trained large models, remedying the limitations of past reviews in terms of only focusing on semi-supervised VAD and small model based methods. For the VAD task with different levels of supervision, we construct a well-organized taxonomy, profoundly discuss the characteristics of different types of methods, and show their performance comparisons. In addition, this review involves the public datasets, open-source codes, and evaluation metrics covering all the aforementioned VAD tasks. Finally, we provide several important research directions for the VAD community.

Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection and Localization with Spatio-Temporal Prompts

Current weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WSVAD) task aims to achieve frame-level anomalous event detection with only coarse video-level annotations available. Existing works typically involve extracting global features from full-resolution video frames and training frame-level classifiers to detect anomalies in the temporal dimension. However, most anomalous events tend to occur in localized spatial regions rather than the entire video frames, which implies existing frame-level feature based works may be misled by the dominant background information and lack the interpretation of the detected anomalies. To address this dilemma, this paper introduces a novel method called STPrompt that learns spatio-temporal prompt embeddings for weakly supervised video anomaly detection and localization (WSVADL) based on pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs). Our proposed method employs a two-stream network structure, with one stream focusing on the temporal dimension and the other primarily on the spatial dimension. By leveraging the learned knowledge from pre-trained VLMs and incorporating natural motion priors from raw videos, our model learns prompt embeddings that are aligned with spatio-temporal regions of videos (e.g., patches of individual frames) for identify specific local regions of anomalies, enabling accurate video anomaly detection while mitigating the influence of background information. Without relying on detailed spatio-temporal annotations or auxiliary object detection/tracking, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three public benchmarks for the WSVADL task.

Cluster-Wide Task Slowdown Detection in Cloud System

Slow task detection is a critical problem in cloud operation and maintenance since it is highly related to user experience and can bring substantial liquidated damages. Most anomaly detection methods detect it from a single-task aspect. However, considering millions of concurrent tasks in large-scale cloud computing clusters, it becomes impractical and inefficient. Moreover, single-task slowdowns are very common and do not necessarily indicate a malfunction of a cluster due to its violent fluctuation nature in a virtual environment. Thus, we shift our attention to cluster-wide task slowdowns by utilizing the duration time distribution of tasks across a cluster, so that the computation complexity is not relevant to the number of tasks. The task duration time distribution often exhibits compound periodicity and local exceptional fluctuations over time. Though transformer-based methods are one of the most powerful methods to capture these time series normal variation patterns, we empirically find and theoretically explain the flaw of the standard attention mechanism in reconstructing subperiods with low amplitude when dealing with compound periodicity. To tackle these challenges, we propose SORN (i.e., Skimming Off subperiods in descending amplitude order and Reconstructing Non-slowing fluctuation), which consists of a Skimming Attention mechanism to reconstruct the compound periodicity and a Neural Optimal Transport module to distinguish cluster-wide slowdowns from other exceptional fluctuations. Furthermore, since anomalies in the training set are inevitable in a practical scenario, we propose a picky loss function, which adaptively assigns higher weights to reliable time slots in the training set. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SORN outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple real-world industrial datasets.