Industrial defect detection is commonly addressed with anomaly detection (AD) methods where no or only incomplete data of potentially occurring defects is available. This work discovers previously unknown problems of student-teacher approaches for AD and proposes a solution, where two neural networks are trained to produce the same output for the defect-free training examples. The core assumption of student-teacher networks is that the distance between the outputs of both networks is larger for anomalies since they are absent in training. However, previous methods suffer from the similarity of student and teacher architecture, such that the distance is undesirably small for anomalies. For this reason, we propose asymmetric student-teacher networks (AST). We train a normalizing flow for density estimation as a teacher and a conventional feed-forward network as a student to trigger large distances for anomalies: The bijectivity of the normalizing flow enforces a divergence of teacher outputs for anomalies compared to normal data. Outside the training distribution the student cannot imitate this divergence due to its fundamentally different architecture. Our AST network compensates for wrongly estimated likelihoods by a normalizing flow, which was alternatively used for anomaly detection in previous work. We show that our method produces state-of-the-art results on the two currently most relevant defect detection datasets MVTec AD and MVTec 3D-AD regarding image-level anomaly detection on RGB and 3D data.
The abundance of data has given machine learning considerable momentum in natural sciences and engineering, though modeling of physical processes is often difficult. A particularly tough problem is the efficient representation of geometric boundaries. Triangularized geometric boundaries are well understood and ubiquitous in engineering applications. However, it is notoriously difficult to integrate them into machine learning approaches due to their heterogeneity with respect to size and orientation. In this work, we introduce an effective theory to model particle-boundary interactions, which leads to our new Boundary Graph Neural Networks (BGNNs) that dynamically modify graph structures to obey boundary conditions. The new BGNNs are tested on complex 3D granular flow processes of hoppers, rotating drums and mixers, which are all standard components of modern industrial machinery but still have complicated geometry. BGNNs are evaluated in terms of computational efficiency as well as prediction accuracy of particle flows and mixing entropies. BGNNs are able to accurately reproduce 3D granular flows within simulation uncertainties over hundreds of thousands of simulation timesteps. Most notably, in our experiments, particles stay within the geometric objects without using handcrafted conditions or restrictions.
Deep anomaly detection methods learn representations that separate between normal and anomalous images. Although self-supervised representation learning is commonly used, small dataset sizes limit its effectiveness. It was previously shown that utilizing external, generic datasets (e.g. ImageNet classification) can significantly improve anomaly detection performance. One approach is outlier exposure, which fails when the external datasets do not resemble the anomalies. We take the approach of transferring representations pre-trained on external datasets for anomaly detection. Anomaly detection performance can be significantly improved by fine-tuning the pre-trained representations on the normal training images. In this paper, we first demonstrate and analyze that contrastive learning, the most popular self-supervised learning paradigm cannot be naively applied to pre-trained features. The reason is that pre-trained feature initialization causes poor conditioning for standard contrastive objectives, resulting in bad optimization dynamics. Based on our analysis, we provide a modified contrastive objective, the Mean-Shifted Contrastive Loss. Our method is highly effective and achieves a new state-of-the-art anomaly detection performance including $98.6\%$ ROC-AUC on the CIFAR-10 dataset.
Industrial vision anomaly detection plays a critical role in the advanced intelligent manufacturing process, while some limitations still need to be addressed under such a context. First, existing reconstruction-based methods struggle with the identity mapping of trivial shortcuts where the reconstruction error gap is legible between the normal and abnormal samples, leading to inferior detection capabilities. Then, the previous studies mainly concentrated on the convolutional neural network (CNN) models that capture the local semantics of objects and neglect the global context, also resulting in inferior performance. Moreover, existing studies follow the individual learning fashion where the detection models are only capable of one category of the product while the generalizable detection for multiple categories has not been explored. To tackle the above limitations, we proposed a self-induction vision Transformer(SIVT) for unsupervised generalizable multi-category industrial visual anomaly detection and localization. The proposed SIVT first extracts discriminatory features from pre-trained CNN as property descriptors. Then, the self-induction vision Transformer is proposed to reconstruct the extracted features in a self-supervisory fashion, where the auxiliary induction tokens are additionally introduced to induct the semantics of the original signal. Finally, the abnormal properties can be detected using the semantic feature residual difference. We experimented with the SIVT on existing Mvtec AD benchmarks, the results reveal that the proposed method can advance state-of-the-art detection performance with an improvement of 2.8-6.3 in AUROC, and 3.3-7.6 in AP.
Recently, graph anomaly detection has attracted increasing attention in data mining and machine learning communities. Apart from existing attribute anomalies, graph anomaly detection also captures suspicious topological-abnormal nodes that differ from the major counterparts. Although massive graph-based detection approaches have been proposed, most of them focus on node-level comparison while pay insufficient attention on the surrounding topology structures. Nodes with more dissimilar neighborhood substructures have more suspicious to be abnormal. To enhance the local substructure detection ability, we propose a novel Graph Anomaly Detection framework via Multi-scale Substructure Learning (GADMSL for abbreviation). Unlike previous algorithms, we manage to capture anomalous substructures where the inner similarities are relatively low in dense-connected regions. Specifically, we adopt a region proposal module to find high-density substructures in the network as suspicious regions. Their inner-node embedding similarities indicate the anomaly degree of the detected substructures. Generally, a lower degree of embedding similarities means a higher probability that the substructure contains topology anomalies. To distill better embeddings of node attributes, we further introduce a graph contrastive learning scheme, which observes attribute anomalies in the meantime. In this way, GADMSL can detect both topology and attribute anomalies. Ultimately, extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that GADMSL greatly improves detection performance (up to 7.30% AUC and 17.46% AUPRC gains) compared to state-of-the-art attributed networks anomaly detection algorithms.
Visual anomaly detection plays a crucial role in not only manufacturing inspection to find defects of products during manufacturing processes, but also maintenance inspection to keep equipment in optimum working condition particularly outdoors. Due to the scarcity of the defective samples, unsupervised anomaly detection has attracted great attention in recent years. However, existing datasets for unsupervised anomaly detection are biased towards manufacturing inspection, not considering maintenance inspection which is usually conducted under outdoor uncontrolled environment such as varying camera viewpoints, messy background and degradation of object surface after long-term working. We focus on outdoor maintenance inspection and contribute a comprehensive Maintenance Inspection Anomaly Detection (MIAD) dataset which contains more than 100K high-resolution color images in various outdoor industrial scenarios. This dataset is generated by a 3D graphics software and covers both surface and logical anomalies with pixel-precise ground truth. Extensive evaluations of representative algorithms for unsupervised anomaly detection are conducted, and we expect MIAD and corresponding experimental results can inspire research community in outdoor unsupervised anomaly detection tasks. Worthwhile and related future work can be spawned from our new dataset.
The considerable significance of Anomaly Detection (AD) problem has recently drawn the attention of many researchers. Consequently, the number of proposed methods in this research field has been increased steadily. AD strongly correlates with the important computer vision and image processing tasks such as image/video anomaly, irregularity and sudden event detection. More recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) offer a high performance set of solutions, but at the expense of a heavy computational cost. However, there is a noticeable gap between the previously proposed methods and an applicable real-word approach. Regarding the raised concerns about AD as an ongoing challenging problem, notably in images and videos, the time has come to argue over the pitfalls and prospects of methods have attempted to deal with visual AD tasks. Hereupon, in this survey we intend to conduct an in-depth investigation into the images/videos deep learning based AD methods. We also discuss current challenges and future research directions thoroughly.
Deep neural models in recent years have been successful in almost every field, including extremely complex problem statements. However, these models are huge in size, with millions (and even billions) of parameters, thus demanding more heavy computation power and failing to be deployed on edge devices. Besides, the performance boost is highly dependent on redundant labeled data. To achieve faster speeds and to handle the problems caused by the lack of data, knowledge distillation (KD) has been proposed to transfer information learned from one model to another. KD is often characterized by the so-called `Student-Teacher' (S-T) learning framework and has been broadly applied in model compression and knowledge transfer. This paper is about KD and S-T learning, which are being actively studied in recent years. First, we aim to provide explanations of what KD is and how/why it works. Then, we provide a comprehensive survey on the recent progress of KD methods together with S-T frameworks typically for vision tasks. In general, we consider some fundamental questions that have been driving this research area and thoroughly generalize the research progress and technical details. Additionally, we systematically analyze the research status of KD in vision applications. Finally, we discuss the potentials and open challenges of existing methods and prospect the future directions of KD and S-T learning.
The prevalence of networked sensors and actuators in many real-world systems such as smart buildings, factories, power plants, and data centers generate substantial amounts of multivariate time series data for these systems. The rich sensor data can be continuously monitored for intrusion events through anomaly detection. However, conventional threshold-based anomaly detection methods are inadequate due to the dynamic complexities of these systems, while supervised machine learning methods are unable to exploit the large amounts of data due to the lack of labeled data. On the other hand, current unsupervised machine learning approaches have not fully exploited the spatial-temporal correlation and other dependencies amongst the multiple variables (sensors/actuators) in the system for detecting anomalies. In this work, we propose an unsupervised multivariate anomaly detection method based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Instead of treating each data stream independently, our proposed MAD-GAN framework considers the entire variable set concurrently to capture the latent interactions amongst the variables. We also fully exploit both the generator and discriminator produced by the GAN, using a novel anomaly score called DR-score to detect anomalies by discrimination and reconstruction. We have tested our proposed MAD-GAN using two recent datasets collected from real-world CPS: the Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) and the Water Distribution (WADI) datasets. Our experimental results showed that the proposed MAD-GAN is effective in reporting anomalies caused by various cyber-intrusions compared in these complex real-world systems.
It is important to detect anomalous inputs when deploying machine learning systems. The use of larger and more complex inputs in deep learning magnifies the difficulty of distinguishing between anomalous and in-distribution examples. At the same time, diverse image and text data are available in enormous quantities. We propose leveraging these data to improve deep anomaly detection by training anomaly detectors against an auxiliary dataset of outliers, an approach we call Outlier Exposure (OE). This enables anomaly detectors to generalize and detect unseen anomalies. In extensive experiments on natural language processing and small- and large-scale vision tasks, we find that Outlier Exposure significantly improves detection performance. We also observe that cutting-edge generative models trained on CIFAR-10 may assign higher likelihoods to SVHN images than to CIFAR-10 images; we use OE to mitigate this issue. We also analyze the flexibility and robustness of Outlier Exposure, and identify characteristics of the auxiliary dataset that improve performance.
We propose the idea of transferring common-sense knowledge from source categories to target categories for scalable object detection. In our setting, the training data for the source categories have bounding box annotations, while those for the target categories only have image-level annotations. Current state-of-the-art approaches focus on image-level visual or semantic similarity to adapt a detector trained on the source categories to the new target categories. In contrast, our key idea is to (i) use similarity not at image-level, but rather at region-level, as well as (ii) leverage richer common-sense (based on attribute, spatial, etc.,) to guide the algorithm towards learning the correct detections. We acquire such common-sense cues automatically from readily-available knowledge bases without any extra human effort. On the challenging MS COCO dataset, we find that using common-sense knowledge substantially improves detection performance over existing transfer-learning baselines.