# Contrastive Predictive Coding for Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.07820 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07820/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [PaDiM: a Patch Distribution Modeling Framework for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08785/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Generative Adversarial Networks to Guide Marker Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05921/) (2017)
- [CutPaste: Self-Supervised Learning for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04015/) (2021)
- [CSI: Novelty Detection via Contrastive Learning on Distributionally Shifted Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08176/) (2020)
- [A Unifying Review of Deep and Shallow Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11732/) (2020)
- [Uninformed Students: Student-Teacher Anomaly Detection with Discriminative Latent Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02357/) (2019)
- [Deep Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02694/) (2019)
- [Improving Unsupervised Defect Segmentation by Applying Structural Similarity to Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02011/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Training for Improved Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05566/) (2020)
- [Learning and Evaluating Representations for Deep One-class Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02578/) (2020)
- [Explainable Deep One-Class Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01760/) (2020)
- [Towards Visually Explaining Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07389/) (2019)
- [Neural Transformation Learning for Deep Anomaly Detection Beyond Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16440/) (2021)
- [Putting An End to End-to-End: Gradient-Isolated Learning of Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11786/) (2019)
- [Encoding Structure-Texture Relation with P-Net for Anomaly Detection in Retinal Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03632/) (2020)
- [Driver Anomaly Detection: A Dataset and Contrastive Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14660/) (2020)
- [The Clever Hans Effect in Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10609/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Deep Industrial Image Anomaly Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11514/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Localization in Industrial Images: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10298/) (2022)
- [IM-IAD: Industrial Image Anomaly Detection Benchmark in Manufacturing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13359/) (2023)
- [Explainable Time Series Anomaly Detection using Masked Latent Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12550/) (2023)
- [Detecting Anomalies within Time Series using Local Neural Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03944/) (2022)
- [Deep Contrastive One-Class Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01472/) (2022)
- [Universal Novelty Detection Through Adaptive Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10798/) (2024)
- [Incomplete Multimodal Industrial Anomaly Detection via Cross-Modal Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13571/) (2024)
- [RoCA: Robust Contrastive One-class Time Series Anomaly Detection with Contaminated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18385/) (2025)
- [AutoSciDACT: Automated Scientific Discovery through Contrastive Embedding and Hypothesis Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21935/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reliable detection of anomalies is crucial when deploying machine learning models in practice, but remains challenging due to the lack of labeled data. To tackle this challenge, contrastive learning approaches are becoming increasingly popular, given the impressive results they have achieved in self-supervised representation learning settings. However, while most existing contrastive anomaly detection and segmentation approaches have been applied to images, none of them can use the contrastive losses directly for both anomaly detection and segmentation. In this paper, we close this gap by making use of the Contrastive Predictive Coding model (arXiv:1807.03748). We show that its patch-wise contrastive loss can directly be interpreted as an anomaly score, and how this allows for the creation of anomaly segmentation masks. The resulting model achieves promising results for both anomaly detection and segmentation on the challenging MVTec-AD dataset.