# Toward Generalist Anomaly Detection via In-context Residual Learning with Few-shot Sample Prompts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06495 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06495/

## Key facts

- Cited by 89 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [PaDiM: a Patch Distribution Modeling Framework for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08785/) (2020)
- [DRAEM -- A discriminatively trained reconstruction embedding for surface anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07610/) (2021)
- [Anomaly Detection via Reverse Distillation from One-Class Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10703/) (2022)
- [Unified-IO: A Unified Model for Vision, Language, and Multi-Modal Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08916/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Pix2seq: A Language Modeling Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10852/) (2021)
- [Images Speak in Images: A Generalist Painter for In-Context Visual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02499/) (2022)
- [WinCLIP: Zero-/Few-Shot Anomaly Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14814/) (2023)
- [Sub-Image Anomaly Detection with Deep Pyramid Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02357/) (2020)
- [Deep Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02694/) (2019)
- [Multiresolution Knowledge Distillation for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11108/) (2020)
- [Learning Memory-guided Normality for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13228/) (2020)
- [AnomalyCLIP: Object-agnostic Prompt Learning for Zero-shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18961/) (2023)
- [Visual Prompting via Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00647/) (2022)
- [Patch SVDD: Patch-level SVDD for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16067/) (2020)
- [Classification-Based Anomaly Detection for General Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02359/) (2020)
- [SegGPT: Segmenting Everything In Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03284/) (2023)
- [A Unified Sequence Interface for Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07669/) (2022)
- [Student-Teacher Feature Pyramid Matching for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04257/) (2021)
- [Segmentation-Based Deep-Learning Approach for Surface-Defect Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08536/) (2019)
- [Registration based Few-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07361/) (2022)
- [VadCLIP: Adapting Vision-Language Models for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11681/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 89)

- [Towards Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection and Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07601/) (2025)
- [ARC: A Generalist Graph Anomaly Detector with In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16771/) (2024)
- [Exploring Intrinsic Normal Prototypes within a Single Image for Universal Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02424/) (2025)
- [MMAD: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09453/) (2024)
- [Learning Transferable Negative Prompts for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03248/) (2024)
- [Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection and Localization with Spatio-Temporal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05905/) (2024)
- [Deep Graph Anomaly Detection: A Survey and New Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09957/) (2024)
- [Do LLMs Understand Visual Anomalies? Uncovering LLM's Capabilities in Zero-shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09654/) (2024)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection and Beyond in Vision Language Model Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21794/) (2024)
- [AdaptCLIP: Adapting CLIP for Universal Visual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09926/) (2025)
- [Zero-shot Generalist Graph Anomaly Detection with Unified Neighborhood Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14886/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Anomaly and Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01980/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning for Video Anomaly Detection: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05383/) (2024)
- [MANTA: A Large-Scale Multi-View and Visual-Text Anomaly Detection Dataset for Tiny Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04867/) (2024)
- [ResAD: A Simple Framework for Class Generalizable Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20047/) (2024)
- [Fine-grained Abnormality Prompt Learning for Zero-shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10289/) (2024)
- [Learning Feature Inversion for Multi-class Anomaly Detection under General-purpose COCO-AD Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10760/) (2024)
- [MetaUAS: Universal Anomaly Segmentation with One-Prompt Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09265/) (2025)
- [MultiADS: Defect-aware Supervision for Multi-type Anomaly Detection and Segmentation in Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06740/) (2025)
- [VisualAD: Language-Free Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection via Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07952/) (2026)
- [DictAS: A Framework for Class-Generalizable Few-Shot Anomaly Segmentation via Dictionary Lookup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13560/) (2025)
- [Normal-Abnormal Guided Generalist Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00495/) (2025)
- [Taming Vision-Language Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18378/) (2025)
- [Foundation Models and Transformers for Anomaly Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15905/) (2025)
- [From Few-Shot to Zero-Shot: Towards Generalist Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18793/) (2026)
- [One-to-Normal: Anomaly Personalization for Few-shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01201/) (2025)
- [INP-Former++: Advancing Universal Anomaly Detection via Intrinsic Normal Prototypes and Residual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03660/) (2025)
- [AF-CLIP: Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection via Anomaly-Focused CLIP Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19949/) (2025)
- [Dinomaly2: A Unified Framework for Unsupervised Image Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17611/) (2025)
- [Commonality in Few: Few-Shot Multimodal Anomaly Detection via Hypergraph-Enhanced Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05966/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper explores the problem of Generalist Anomaly Detection (GAD), aiming to train one single detection model that can generalize to detect anomalies in diverse datasets from different application domains without any further training on the target data. Some recent studies have shown that large pre-trained Visual-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have strong generalization capabilities on detecting industrial defects from various datasets, but their methods rely heavily on handcrafted text prompts about defects, making them difficult to generalize to anomalies in other applications, e.g., medical image anomalies or semantic anomalies in natural images. In this work, we propose to train a GAD model with few-shot normal images as sample prompts for AD on diverse datasets on the fly. To this end, we introduce a novel approach that learns an in-context residual learning model for GAD, termed InCTRL. It is trained on an auxiliary dataset to discriminate anomalies from normal samples based on a holistic evaluation of the residuals between query images and few-shot normal sample prompts. Regardless of the datasets, per definition of anomaly, larger residuals are expected for anomalies than normal samples, thereby enabling InCTRL to generalize across different domains without further training. Comprehensive experiments on nine AD datasets are performed to establish a GAD benchmark that encapsulate the detection of industrial defect anomalies, medical anomalies, and semantic anomalies in both one-vs-all and multi-class setting, on which InCTRL is the best performer and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art competing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/InCTRL.