# COFT-AD: COntrastive Fine-Tuning for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18998 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18998/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [Deep Visual Domain Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03601/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Generative Adversarial Networks to Guide Marker Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05921/) (2017)
- [Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08974/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Anomaly Detection via Reverse Distillation from One-Class Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10703/) (2022)
- [CFLOW-AD: Real-Time Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Localization via Conditional Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12571/) (2021)
- [Deep Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02694/) (2019)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection Using Geometric Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10917/) (2018)
- [Improving Unsupervised Defect Segmentation by Applying Structural Similarity to Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02011/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10377/) (2022)
- [Patch SVDD: Patch-level SVDD for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16067/) (2020)
- [Same Same But DifferNet: Semi-Supervised Defect Detection with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12577/) (2020)
- [OCGAN: One-class Novelty Detection Using GANs with Constrained Latent Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08550/) (2019)
- [Detecting the Unexpected via Image Resynthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07595/) (2019)
- [Learning and Evaluating Representations for Deep One-class Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02578/) (2020)
- [Registration based Few-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07361/) (2022)
- [Deep Isolation Forest for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06602/) (2022)
- [Learning Representations of Ultrahigh-dimensional Data for Random Distance-based Outlier Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04808/) (2018)
- [Learning Deep Features for One-Class Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05365/) (2018)
- [Pushing the Limits of Fewshot Anomaly Detection in Industry Vision: Graphcore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12082/) (2023)
- [Explainable Deep Few-shot Anomaly Detection with Deviation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00462/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Toward Generalist Anomaly Detection via In-context Residual Learning with Few-shot Sample Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06495/) (2024)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection and Beyond in Vision Language Model Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21794/) (2024)
- [CLIP3D-AD: Extending CLIP for 3D Few-Shot Anomaly Detection with Multi-View Images Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18941/) (2024)
- [Salvaging the Overlooked: Leveraging Class-Aware Contrastive Learning for Multi-Class Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04769/) (2024)
- [Distribution Prototype Diffusion Learning for Open-set Supervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20981/) (2025)
- [DictAS: A Framework for Class-Generalizable Few-Shot Anomaly Segmentation via Dictionary Lookup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13560/) (2025)
- [AD-Copilot: A Vision-Language Assistant for Industrial Anomaly Detection via Visual In-context Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13779/) (2026)
- [IPAD: Industrial Process Anomaly Detection Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15033/) (2024)
- [Multi-View Industrial Anomaly Detection with Epipolar Constrained Cross-View Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11088/) (2025)
- [Toward Long-Tailed Online Anomaly Detection through Class-Agnostic Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16946/) (2025)
- [InCTRLv2: Generalist Residual Models for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04632/) (2026)
- [DART: A Vision-Language Foundation Model for Comprehensive Rope Condition Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04943/) (2026)
- [Beyond Normal References: Discriminative Few-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23231/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing approaches towards anomaly detection~(AD) often rely on a substantial amount of anomaly-free data to train representation and density models. However, large anomaly-free datasets may not always be available before the inference stage; in which case an anomaly detection model must be trained with only a handful of normal samples, a.k.a. few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD). In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to address the challenge of FSAD which incorporates two important techniques. Firstly, we employ a model pre-trained on a large source dataset to initialize model weights. Secondly, to ameliorate the covariate shift between source and target domains, we adopt contrastive training to fine-tune on the few-shot target domain data. To learn suitable representations for the downstream AD task, we additionally incorporate cross-instance positive pairs to encourage a tight cluster of the normal samples, and negative pairs for better separation between normal and synthesized negative samples. We evaluate few-shot anomaly detection on on 3 controlled AD tasks and 4 real-world AD tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.