# Robust Distribution Alignment for Industrial Anomaly Detection under Distribution Shift

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14910 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14910/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [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)
- [CFLOW-AD: Real-Time Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Localization via Conditional Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12571/) (2021)
- [Multiresolution Knowledge Distillation for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11108/) (2020)
- [Joint Distribution Optimal Transportation for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08848/) (2017)
- [A Unified Model for Multi-class Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03687/) (2022)
- [SimpleNet: A Simple Network for Image Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15140/) (2023)
- [Sliced Wasserstein Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04064/) (2019)
- [DeepJDOT: Deep Joint Distribution Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10081/) (2018)
- [The MVTec 3D-AD Dataset for Unsupervised 3D Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09045/) (2021)
- [Source Data-absent Unsupervised Domain Adaptation through Hypothesis Transfer and Labeling Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Structurally Regularized Deep Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08607/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Industrial Anomaly Detection via Hybrid Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00601/) (2023)
- [Real-IAD: A Real-World Multi-View Dataset for Benchmarking Versatile Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12580/) (2024)
- [RealNet: A Feature Selection Network with Realistic Synthetic Anomaly for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05897/) (2024)
- [Robust Optimal Transport with Applications in Generative Modeling and Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05862/) (2020)
- [Pushing the Limits of Fewshot Anomaly Detection in Industry Vision: Graphcore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12082/) (2023)
- [Deep One-Class Classification via Interpolated Gaussian Descriptor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10043/) (2021)
- [Banach Wasserstein GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06621/) (2018)
- [SoftPatch: Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Noisy Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14233/) (2024)
- [Source-Relaxed Domain Adaptation for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03697/) (2020)
- [Exploring Plain ViT Reconstruction for Multi-class Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07495/) (2023)
- [Outlier-Robust Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07363/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Realistic Test-Time Training: Sequential Inference and Adaptation by Anchored Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02721/) (2022)
- [Anomaly Detection under Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13845/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Realistic Test-Time Training: Sequential Inference and Adaptation by Anchored Clustering Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10856/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Examining the Source of Defects from a Mechanical Perspective for 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05901/) (2025)
- [SPARC: Subspace Position-Aware Robust Few-Shot Calibration for Distribution-Shifted Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18585/) (2026)
- [Test-Time Adaptation for Anomaly Segmentation via Topology-Aware Optimal Transport Chaining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20333/) (2026)
- [LogiCo: A Unified Framework for Logical and Structural Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28688/) (2026)
- [UniVAD v2: Unified Visual Anomaly Detection via Support-Conditioned Boundary Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29714/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Anomaly detection plays a crucial role in quality control for industrial applications. However, ensuring robustness under unseen domain shifts such as lighting variations or sensor drift remains a significant challenge. Existing methods attempt to address domain shifts by training generalizable models but often rely on prior knowledge of target distributions and can hardly generalise to backbones designed for other data modalities. To overcome these limitations, we build upon memory-bank-based anomaly detection methods, optimizing a robust Sinkhorn distance on limited target training data to enhance generalization to unseen target domains. We evaluate the effectiveness on both 2D and 3D anomaly detection benchmarks with simulated distribution shifts. Our proposed method demonstrates superior results compared with state-of-the-art anomaly detection and domain adaptation methods.
