# An Incremental Unified Framework for Small Defect Inspection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.08917 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08917/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2023.

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

- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [Memory Aware Synapses: Learning what (not) to forget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09601/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Continual Learning: Theory, Method and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00487/) (2023)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [Riemannian Walk for Incremental Learning: Understanding Forgetting and Intransigence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10112/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Sparsity in Deep Learning: Pruning and growth for efficient inference and training in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00554/) (2021)
- [DRAEM -- A discriminatively trained reconstruction embedding for surface anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07610/) (2021)
- [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)
- [SVDiff: Compact Parameter Space for Diffusion Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11305/) (2023)
- [Sub-Image Anomaly Detection with Deep Pyramid Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02357/) (2020)
- [HRank: Filter Pruning using High-Rank Feature Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10179/) (2020)
- [A Unified Model for Multi-class Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03687/) (2022)
- [Improving Unsupervised Defect Segmentation by Applying Structural Similarity to Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02011/) (2018)
- [SimpleNet: A Simple Network for Image Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15140/) (2023)
- [PANDA: Adapting Pretrained Features for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05903/) (2020)
- [Towards Visually Explaining Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07389/) (2019)
- [Inpainting Transformer for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13897/) (2021)
- [ResRep: Lossless CNN Pruning via Decoupling Remembering and Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03260/) (2020)
- [Pushing the Limits of Fewshot Anomaly Detection in Industry Vision: Graphcore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12082/) (2023)
- [Defect Spectrum: A Granular Look of Large-Scale Defect Datasets with Rich Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17316/) (2023)
- [A Continual Learning Framework for Adaptive Defect Classification and Inspection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08796/) (2022)
- [A New Knowledge Distillation Network for Incremental Few-Shot Surface Defect Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00519/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Towards Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection and Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07601/) (2025)
- [One-for-More: Continual Diffusion Model for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19848/) (2025)
- [LPO: Towards Accurate GUI Agent Interaction via Location Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09373/) (2025)
- [Salvaging the Overlooked: Leveraging Class-Aware Contrastive Learning for Multi-Class Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04769/) (2024)
- [ReplayCAD: Generative Diffusion Replay for Continual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06603/) (2025)
- [Center-aware Residual Anomaly Synthesis for Multi-class Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17551/) (2025)
- [Continual-MEGA: A Large-scale Benchmark for Generalizable Continual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00956/) (2025)
- [Towards an Incremental Unified Multimodal Anomaly Detection: Augmenting Multimodal Denoising From an Information Bottleneck Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02629/) (2026)
- [ONER: Online Experience Replay for Incremental Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03907/) (2024)
- [C3D-AD: Toward Continual 3D Anomaly Detection via Kernel Attention with Learnable Advisor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01311/) (2025)
- [BeltCrack: the First Sequential-image Industrial Conveyor Belt Crack Detection Dataset and Its Baseline with Triple-domain Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17892/) (2025)
- [ADNet: A Large-Scale and Extensible Multi-Domain Benchmark for Anomaly Detection Across 380 Real-World Categories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20169/) (2025)
- [Toward Long-Tailed Online Anomaly Detection through Class-Agnostic Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16946/) (2025)
- [MECAD: A multi-expert architecture for continual anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15323/) (2025)
- [Continual Learning of Domain-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15775/) (2026)
- [Normality-Preserving Continual Industrial Anomaly Detection via Orthogonal LoRA Banks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02042/) (2026)
- [Robust-U1: Can MLLMs Self-Recover Corrupted Visual Content for Robust Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08063/) (2026)
- [CL-Anomaly: Layer-Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts with Multimodal Large Language Model for Continual Learning in Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02930/) (2026)
- [Class Incremental Medical Image Segmentation via Prototype-Guided Calibration and Dual-Aligned Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07749/) (2025)
- [AdapTS: Lightweight Teacher-Student Approach for Multi-Class and Continual Visual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17530/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Continual Anomaly Detection on the Edge: Benchmarking Under Realistic Industrial Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24251/) (2026)
- [DeCoFlow: Structural Decomposition of Normalizing Flows for Continual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26687/) (2026)
- [Memory-Bounded Continuation of Greedy Sampling for Continual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15277/) (2026)
- [FuDU: A Fuzzy Dual-dimensional Uncertainty Framework for Streaming Active Learning in Industrial Defect Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02212/) (2026)
- [Neural-Collapse-guided Task-Free Continual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03406/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven defect inspection is pivotal in industrial manufacturing. Yet, many methods, tailored to specific pipelines, grapple with diverse product portfolios and evolving processes. Addressing this, we present the Incremental Unified Framework (IUF), which can reduce the feature conflict problem when continuously integrating new objects in the pipeline, making it advantageous in object-incremental learning scenarios. Employing a state-of-the-art transformer, we introduce Object-Aware Self-Attention (OASA) to delineate distinct semantic boundaries. Semantic Compression Loss (SCL) is integrated to optimize non-primary semantic space, enhancing network adaptability for novel objects. Additionally, we prioritize retaining the features of established objects during weight updates. Demonstrating prowess in both image and pixel-level defect inspection, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, proving indispensable for dynamic and scalable industrial inspections. Our code will be released at https://github.com/jqtangust/IUF.