# TailedCore: Few-Shot Sampling for Unsupervised Long-Tail Noisy Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02775 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02775/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [Large-Scale Long-Tailed Recognition in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05160/) (2019)
- [PaDiM: a Patch Distribution Modeling Framework for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08785/) (2020)
- [SPot-the-Difference Self-Supervised Pre-training for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14315/) (2022)
- [WinCLIP: Zero-/Few-Shot Anomaly Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14814/) (2023)
- [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)
- [PyOD: A Python Toolbox for Scalable Outlier Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01588/) (2019)
- [AnomalyGPT: Detecting Industrial Anomalies Using Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15366/) (2023)
- [Registration based Few-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07361/) (2022)
- [Pushing the Limits of Fewshot Anomaly Detection in Industry Vision: Graphcore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12082/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Visual Anomaly Detection: Challenge, Approach, and Prospect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16402/) (2024)
- [On the Impact of Spurious Correlation for Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05642/) (2021)
- [Deep One-Class Classification via Interpolated Gaussian Descriptor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10043/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Vector Quantized Transformer for Multi-class Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14228/) (2023)
- [SoftPatch: Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Noisy Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14233/) (2024)
- [MuSc: Zero-Shot Industrial Anomaly Classification and Segmentation with Mutual Scoring of the Unlabeled Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16753/) (2024)
- [Robust Long-Tailed Learning under Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11569/) (2021)
- [When Noisy Labels Meet Long Tail Dilemmas: A Representation Calibration Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10955/) (2022)
- [Label-Noise Learning with Intrinsically Long-Tailed Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09833/) (2022)
- [UniFormaly: Towards Task-Agnostic Unified Framework for Visual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12540/) (2023)
- [Combating Noisy Labels in Long-Tailed Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00273/) (2022)

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

- [A Comprehensive Survey for Real-World Industrial Defect Detection: Challenges, Approaches, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13378/) (2025)
- [Memory-Distilled Selection for Noise-Robust Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26676/) (2026)
- [Retrospective Memory for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15244/) (2025)
- [Isolating to Harness: Cross-Division Distillation for Fully Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18007/) (2025)
- [Autonomous Drift Learning in Data Streams: A Unified Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01295/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We aim to solve unsupervised anomaly detection in a practical challenging environment where the normal dataset is both contaminated with defective regions and its product class distribution is tailed but unknown. We observe that existing models suffer from tail-versus-noise trade-off where if a model is robust against pixel noise, then its performance deteriorates on tail class samples, and vice versa. To mitigate the issue, we handle the tail class and noise samples independently. To this end, we propose TailSampler, a novel class size predictor that estimates the class cardinality of samples based on a symmetric assumption on the class-wise distribution of embedding similarities. TailSampler can be utilized to sample the tail class samples exclusively, allowing to handle them separately. Based on these facets, we build a memory-based anomaly detection model TailedCore, whose memory both well captures tail class information and is noise-robust. We extensively validate the effectiveness of TailedCore on the unsupervised long-tail noisy anomaly detection setting, and show that TailedCore outperforms the state-of-the-art in most settings.