# Contrastive Representation Modeling for Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05130 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05130/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04606/) (2018)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11334/) (2021)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04592/) (2020)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection with Deep Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06507/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Using Self-Supervised Learning Can Improve Model Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12340/) (2019)
- [DRAEM -- A discriminatively trained reconstruction embedding for surface anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07610/) (2021)
- [CSI: Novelty Detection via Contrastive Learning on Distributionally Shifted Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08176/) (2020)
- [VOS: Learning What You Don't Know by Virtual Outlier Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01197/) (2022)
- [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)
- [SSD: A Unified Framework for Self-Supervised Outlier Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12051/) (2021)
- [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)
- [StableRep: Synthetic Images from Text-to-Image Models Make Strong Visual Representation Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00984/) (2023)
- [DeSTSeg: Segmentation Guided Denoising Student-Teacher for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11317/) (2022)
- [Learning and Evaluating Representations for Deep One-class Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02578/) (2020)
- [How to Exploit Hyperspherical Embeddings for Out-of-Distribution Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04450/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Learning Hyperspherical Time-Frequency Representations for Time-Series Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31155/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Distance-based anomaly detection methods rely on compact in-distribution (ID) embeddings that are well separated from anomalies. However, conventional contrastive learning strategies often struggle to achieve this balance, either promoting excessive variance among inliers or failing to preserve the diversity of outliers. We begin by analyzing the challenges of representation learning for anomaly detection and identify three essential properties for the pretext task: (1) compact clustering of inliers, (2) strong separation between inliers and anomalies, and (3) preservation of diversity among synthetic outliers. Building on this, we propose a structured contrastive objective that redefines positive and negative relationships during training, promoting these properties without requiring explicit anomaly labels. We extend this framework with a patch-based learning and evaluation strategy specifically designed to improve the detection of localized anomalies in industrial settings. Our approach demonstrates significantly faster convergence and improved performance compared to standard contrastive methods. It matches or surpasses anomaly detection methods on both semantic and industrial benchmarks, including methods that rely on discriminative training or explicit anomaly labels.