ResAD: A Simple Framework for Class Generalizable Anomaly Detection

TL;DR

ResAD introduces a residual feature-based framework for class-generalizable anomaly detection, effectively reducing feature variation and enabling direct application to new classes without retraining.

Contribution

The paper proposes ResAD, a novel framework that learns residual feature distributions to improve class generalization in anomaly detection tasks.

Findings

ResAD achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets.

It effectively detects anomalies in new classes without retraining.

The residual feature approach reduces feature variation across classes.

Abstract

This paper explores the problem of class-generalizable anomaly detection, where the objective is to train one unified AD model that can generalize to detect anomalies in diverse classes from different domains without any retraining or fine-tuning on the target data. Because normal feature representations vary significantly across classes, this will cause the widely studied one-for-one AD models to be poorly classgeneralizable (i.e., performance drops dramatically when used for new classes). In this work, we propose a simple but effective framework (called ResAD) that can be directly applied to detect anomalies in new classes. Our main insight is to learn the residual feature distribution rather than the initial feature distribution. In this way, we can significantly reduce feature variations. Even in new classes, the distribution of normal residual features would not remarkably shift from the learned distribution. Therefore, the learned model can be directly adapted to new classes. ResAD consists of three components: (1) a Feature Converter that converts initial features into residual features; (2) a simple and shallow Feature Constraintor that constrains normal residual features into a spatial hypersphere for further reducing feature variations and maintaining consistency in feature scales among different classes; (3) a Feature Distribution Estimator that estimates the normal residual feature distribution, anomalies can be recognized as out-of-distribution. Despite the simplicity, ResAD can achieve remarkable anomaly detection results when directly used in new classes. The code is available at https://github.com/xcyao00/ResAD.