GeneralAD: Anomaly Detection Across Domains by Attending to Distorted Features

In the domain of anomaly detection, methods often excel in either semantic or industrial benchmarks, rarely achieving cross-domain proficiency. In this paper, we present GeneralAD, an anomaly detection framework designed to operate in semantic, near-distribution, and industrial settings with minimal per-task adjustments. In our approach, we capitalize on the inherent design of Vision Transformers, which are trained on image patches, thereby ensuring that the last hidden states retain a patch-based structure. We propose a novel self-supervised anomaly generation module that employs straightforward operations like noise addition and shuffling to patch features to construct pseudo-abnormal samples. These features are fed to an attention-based discriminator, which is trained to score every patch in the image. With this, our method can both accurately identify anomalies at the image level and also generate interpretable anomaly maps. We extensively evaluated our approach on 10 benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results in 6 datasets and on-par performance in the remaining for both localization and detection tasks.