# PointAD: Comprehending 3D Anomalies from Points and Pixels for Zero-shot 3D Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.00320 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00320/

## Key facts

- Cited by 29 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [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)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [Multi-view Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Shape Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00880/) (2015)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [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)
- [CFLOW-AD: Real-Time Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Localization via Conditional Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12571/) (2021)
- [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)
- [AnomalyCLIP: Object-agnostic Prompt Learning for Zero-shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18961/) (2023)
- [A Unified Model for Multi-class Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03687/) (2022)
- [FastFlow: Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Localization via 2D Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07677/) (2021)
- [Delving into Out-of-Distribution Detection with Vision-Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13445/) (2022)
- [PointCLIP V2: Prompting CLIP and GPT for Powerful 3D Open-world Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11682/) (2022)
- [PANDA: Adapting Pretrained Features for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05903/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection Based on the Pre-trained Model CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02748/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Shape Classification with a Simple and Effective Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05304/) (2021)
- [MVTN: Multi-View Transformation Network for 3D Shape Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13244/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Industrial Anomaly Detection via Hybrid Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00601/) (2023)
- [Registration based Few-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07361/) (2022)
- [APRIL-GAN: A Zero-/Few-Shot Anomaly Classification and Segmentation Method for CVPR 2023 VAND Workshop Challenge Tracks 1&2: 1st Place on Zero-shot AD and 4th Place on Few-shot AD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17382/) (2023)
- [Explainable Deep One-Class Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01760/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [MC3D-AD: A Unified Geometry-aware Reconstruction Model for Multi-category 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01969/) (2025)
- [Normal-Abnormal Guided Generalist Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00495/) (2025)
- [AnomalyMoE: Towards a Language-free Generalist Model for Unified Visual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06203/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Foundation-Model-Based Industrial Defect Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19106/) (2025)
- [CASL: Curvature-Augmented Self-supervised Learning for 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12909/) (2025)
- [Fence Theorem: Towards Dual-Objective Semantic-Structure Isolation in Preprocessing Phase for 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01100/) (2025)
- [Examining the Source of Defects from a Mechanical Perspective for 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05901/) (2025)
- [GS-CLIP: Zero-shot 3D Anomaly Detection by Geometry-Aware Prompt and Synergistic View Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19206/) (2026)
- [MuSc-V2: Zero-Shot Multimodal Industrial Anomaly Classification and Segmentation with Mutual Scoring of Unlabeled Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10047/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Point-Patch Fusion with Adaptive Patch Codebook for 3D Shape Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03972/) (2026)
- [3D-PNAS: 3D Industrial Surface Anomaly Synthesis with Perlin Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12856/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Survey for Real-World Industrial Defect Detection: Challenges, Approaches, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13378/) (2025)
- [IAENet: An Importance-Aware Ensemble Model for 3D Point Cloud-Based Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20492/) (2025)
- [MCL-AD: Multimodal Collaboration Learning for Zero-Shot 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10282/) (2025)
- [Back to Point: Exploring Point-Language Models for Zero-Shot 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21511/) (2026)
- [PointAD+: Learning Hierarchical Representations for Zero-shot 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03277/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Industrial Anomaly Detection via Geometric Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22757/) (2026)
- [Preference Isolation Forest for Structure-based Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10876/) (2025)
- [Mentor3AD: Feature Reconstruction-based 3D Anomaly Detection via Multi-modality Mentor Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21420/) (2025)
- [TokenCLIP: Token-wise Prompt Learning for Zero-shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21171/) (2025)
- [Open-Set Supervised 3D Anomaly Detection: An Industrial Dataset and a Generalisable Framework for Unknown Defects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01171/) (2026)
- [Synthesis4AD: Synthetic Anomalies are All You Need for 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04658/) (2026)
- [SGANet: Semantic and Geometric Alignment for Multimodal Multi-view Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05632/) (2026)
- [Learning Discriminative Signed Distance Functions from Multi-scale Level-of-detail Features for 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03437/) (2026)
- [Align3D-AD: Cross-Modal Feature Alignment and Dual-Prompt Learning for Zero-shot 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05850/) (2026)
- [CoGeoAD: Hierarchical Color-Geometric Fusion with Multi-View Attention for Zero-Shot 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25273/) (2026)
- [MVFM-3DAD: Multi-view Flow Matching for 3D Anomaly Detection via Density Proxy Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12148/) (2026)
- [When Point Clouds Outperform Pixels: Rethinking Zero-Shot Multimodal Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25793/) (2026)
- [AT3D-AD: Anomaly Type-Aware 3D Anomaly Detection via Hierarchical Point-Language Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25930/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Zero-shot (ZS) 3D anomaly detection is a crucial yet unexplored field that addresses scenarios where target 3D training samples are unavailable due to practical concerns like privacy protection. This paper introduces PointAD, a novel approach that transfers the strong generalization capabilities of CLIP for recognizing 3D anomalies on unseen objects. PointAD provides a unified framework to comprehend 3D anomalies from both points and pixels. In this framework, PointAD renders 3D anomalies into multiple 2D renderings and projects them back into 3D space. To capture the generic anomaly semantics into PointAD, we propose hybrid representation learning that optimizes the learnable text prompts from 3D and 2D through auxiliary point clouds. The collaboration optimization between point and pixel representations jointly facilitates our model to grasp underlying 3D anomaly patterns, contributing to detecting and segmenting anomalies of unseen diverse 3D objects. Through the alignment of 3D and 2D space, our model can directly integrate RGB information, further enhancing the understanding of 3D anomalies in a plug-and-play manner. Extensive experiments show the superiority of PointAD in ZS 3D anomaly detection across diverse unseen objects.