# EfficientAD: Accurate Visual Anomaly Detection at Millisecond-Level Latencies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14535 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14535/

## Key facts

- Cited by 160 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [PaDiM: a Patch Distribution Modeling Framework for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08785/) (2020)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Generative Adversarial Networks to Guide Marker Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05921/) (2017)
- [Memorizing Normality to Detect Anomaly: Memory-augmented Deep Autoencoder for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02639/) (2019)
- [CutPaste: Self-Supervised Learning for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04015/) (2021)
- [Scaling Out-of-Distribution Detection for Real-World Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11132/) (2019)
- [GANomaly: Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection via Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06725/) (2018)
- [SPot-the-Difference Self-Supervised Pre-training for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14315/) (2022)
- [Uninformed Students: Student-Teacher Anomaly Detection with Discriminative Latent Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02357/) (2019)
- [AdaViT: Adaptive Tokens for Efficient Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07658/) (2021)
- [CFLOW-AD: Real-Time Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Localization via Conditional Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12571/) (2021)
- [Sub-Image Anomaly Detection with Deep Pyramid Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02357/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 160)

- [PromptAD: Learning Prompts with only Normal Samples for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05231/) (2024)
- [Dinomaly: The Less Is More Philosophy in Multi-Class Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14325/) (2024)
- [A Unified Anomaly Synthesis Strategy with Gradient Ascent for Industrial Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09359/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Visual Anomaly Detection: Challenge, Approach, and Prospect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16402/) (2024)
- [Exploring Plain ViT Reconstruction for Multi-class Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07495/) (2023)
- [TransFusion -- A Transparency-Based Diffusion Model for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09999/) (2023)
- [Towards Generic Anomaly Detection and Understanding: Large-scale Visual-linguistic Model (GPT-4V) Takes the Lead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02782/) (2023)
- [The MVTec AD 2 Dataset: Advanced Scenarios for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21622/) (2025)
- [GeneralAD: Anomaly Detection Across Domains by Attending to Distorted Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12427/) (2024)
- [Towards Training-free Anomaly Detection with Vision and Language Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18325/) (2025)
- [The Clever Hans Effect in Unsupervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08041/) (2024)
- [Component-aware anomaly detection framework for adjustable and logical industrial visual inspection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08509/) (2023)
- [Target before Shooting: Accurate Anomaly Detection and Localization under One Millisecond via Cascade Patch Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06748/) (2023)
- [LogiCode: an LLM-Driven Framework for Logical Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04687/) (2024)
- [One-for-More: Continual Diffusion Model for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19848/) (2025)
- [Supervised Anomaly Detection for Complex Industrial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04953/) (2024)
- [Video Anomaly Detection in 10 Years: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19387/) (2024)
- [Progressive Boundary Guided Anomaly Synthesis for Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17458/) (2024)
- [SAM-LAD: Segment Anything Model Meets Zero-Shot Logic Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00625/) (2024)
- [Unveiling the Anomalies in an Ever-Changing World: A Benchmark for Pixel-Level Anomaly Detection in Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15463/) (2024)
- [SuperSimpleNet: Unifying Unsupervised and Supervised Learning for Fast and Reliable Surface Defect Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03143/) (2024)
- [CSAD: Unsupervised Component Segmentation for Logical Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15628/) (2024)
- [Text-Guided Variational Image Generation for Industrial Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06247/) (2024)
- [Dual-Modeling Decouple Distillation for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03888/) (2024)
- [AnomalyNCD: Towards Novel Anomaly Class Discovery in Industrial Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14379/) (2024)
- [VarAD: Lightweight High-Resolution Image Anomaly Detection via Visual Autoregressive Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17263/) (2024)
- [LogicQA: Logical Anomaly Detection with Vision Language Model Generated Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20252/) (2025)
- [Foundation Models and Transformers for Anomaly Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15905/) (2025)
- [Towards Real Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Via Confident Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02293/) (2025)
- [PUAD: Frustratingly Simple Method for Robust Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15143/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting anomalies in images is an important task, especially in real-time computer vision applications. In this work, we focus on computational efficiency and propose a lightweight feature extractor that processes an image in less than a millisecond on a modern GPU. We then use a student-teacher approach to detect anomalous features. We train a student network to predict the extracted features of normal, i.e., anomaly-free training images. The detection of anomalies at test time is enabled by the student failing to predict their features. We propose a training loss that hinders the student from imitating the teacher feature extractor beyond the normal images. It allows us to drastically reduce the computational cost of the student-teacher model, while improving the detection of anomalous features. We furthermore address the detection of challenging logical anomalies that involve invalid combinations of normal local features, for example, a wrong ordering of objects. We detect these anomalies by efficiently incorporating an autoencoder that analyzes images globally. We evaluate our method, called EfficientAD, on 32 datasets from three industrial anomaly detection dataset collections. EfficientAD sets new standards for both the detection and the localization of anomalies. At a latency of two milliseconds and a throughput of six hundred images per second, it enables a fast handling of anomalies. Together with its low error rate, this makes it an economical solution for real-world applications and a fruitful basis for future research.