# Industrial Anomaly Detection and Localization Using Weakly-Supervised Residual Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.03492 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03492/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 70 of its 102 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01266/) (2022)
- [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)
- [CutPaste: Self-Supervised Learning for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04015/) (2021)
- [DRAEM -- A discriminatively trained reconstruction embedding for surface anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07610/) (2021)
- [Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10442/) (2022)
- [InternImage: Exploring Large-Scale Vision Foundation Models with Deformable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05778/) (2022)
- [Anomaly Detection via Reverse Distillation from One-Class Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10703/) (2022)
- [Uninformed Students: Student-Teacher Anomaly Detection with Discriminative Latent Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02357/) (2019)
- [ReMixMatch: Semi-Supervised Learning with Distribution Alignment and Augmentation Anchoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09785/) (2019)
- [Mask DINO: Towards A Unified Transformer-based Framework for Object Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02777/) (2022)
- [CFLOW-AD: Real-Time Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Localization via Conditional Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12571/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Soft Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09018/) (2021)
- [Multiresolution Knowledge Distillation for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11108/) (2020)
- [A Unified Model for Multi-class Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03687/) (2022)
- [SimpleNet: A Simple Network for Image Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15140/) (2023)
- [FreeMatch: Self-adaptive Thresholding for Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07246/) (2022)
- [FastFlow: Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Localization via 2D Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07677/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Toward Multi-class Anomaly Detection: Exploring Class-aware Unified Model against Inter-class Interference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14213/) (2024)
- [A Novel Approach to Industrial Defect Generation through Blended Latent Diffusion Model with Online Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19330/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Vision Transformer Models for Visual Quality Control in Industrial Manufacturing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14953/) (2024)
- [Self-Navigated Residual Mamba for Universal Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01591/) (2025)
- [Seeing the Needle in the Haystack: Towards Weakly-Supervised Log Instance Anomaly Localization via Counterfactual Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10988/) (2026)
- [Visual Prompting Meets Feature Reconstruction-Based Anomaly Detection with Dual-Teacher Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09670/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in industrial anomaly detection (AD) have demonstrated that incorporating a small number of anomalous samples during training can significantly enhance accuracy. However, this improvement often comes at the cost of extensive annotation efforts, which are impractical for many real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, Weakly-supervised RESidual Transformer (WeakREST), designed to achieve high anomaly detection accuracy while minimizing the reliance on manual annotations. First, we reformulate the pixel-wise anomaly localization task into a block-wise classification problem. Second, we introduce a residual-based feature representation called Positional Fast Anomaly Residuals (PosFAR) which captures anomalous patterns more effectively. To leverage this feature, we adapt the Swin Transformer for enhanced anomaly detection and localization. Additionally, we propose a weak annotation approach, utilizing bounding boxes and image tags to define anomalous regions. This approach establishes a semi-supervised learning context that reduces the dependency on precise pixel-level labels. To further improve the learning process, we develop a novel ResMixMatch algorithm, capable of handling the interplay between weak labels and residual-based representations. On the benchmark dataset MVTec-AD, our method achieves an Average Precision (AP) of 83.0%, surpassing the previous best result of 82.7% in the unsupervised setting. In the supervised AD setting, WeakREST attains an AP of 87.6%, outperforming the previous best of 86.0%. Notably, even when using weaker annotations such as bounding boxes, WeakREST exceeds the performance of leading methods relying on pixel-wise supervision, achieving an AP of 87.1% compared to the prior best of 86.0% on MVTec-AD.