# Multi-Flow: Multi-View-Enriched Normalizing Flows for Industrial Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03306 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03306/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [NICE: Non-linear Independent Components Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.8516/) (2014)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoregressive Flow for Density Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07057/) (2017)
- [Neural Spline Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04032/) (2019)
- [PaDiM: a Patch Distribution Modeling Framework for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08785/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Generative Adversarial Networks to Guide Marker Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05921/) (2017)
- [CutPaste: Self-Supervised Learning for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04015/) (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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [MADE: Masked Autoencoder for Distribution Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03509/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Improving Unsupervised Defect Segmentation by Applying Structural Similarity to Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02011/) (2018)
- [Flow++: Improving Flow-Based Generative Models with Variational Dequantization and Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00275/) (2019)
- [SimpleNet: A Simple Network for Image Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15140/) (2023)
- [FastFlow: Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Localization via 2D Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07677/) (2021)
- [Why Normalizing Flows Fail to Detect Out-of-Distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08545/) (2020)
- [Same Same But DifferNet: Semi-Supervised Defect Detection with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12577/) (2020)

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

- [UncertainSAM: Fast and Efficient Uncertainty Quantification of the Segment Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05049/) (2025)
- [BUSSARD: Normalizing Flows for Bijective Universal Scene-Specific Anomalous Relationship Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16645/) (2026)
- [MATCH: Flow Matching for Multi-View Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24375/) (2026)
- [PADFormer: Pose-agnostic Anomaly Detection from Sparse View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04210/) (2026)
- [Multi-View Reflective Surface Inspection via Semantic-Saliency Cross-Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30997/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With more well-performing anomaly detection methods proposed, many of the single-view tasks have been solved to a relatively good degree. However, real-world production scenarios often involve complex industrial products, whose properties may not be fully captured by one single image. While normalizing flow based approaches already work well in single-camera scenarios, they currently do not make use of the priors in multi-view data. We aim to bridge this gap by using these flow-based models as a strong foundation and propose Multi-Flow, a novel multi-view anomaly detection method. Multi-Flow makes use of a novel multi-view architecture, whose exact likelihood estimation is enhanced by fusing information across different views. For this, we propose a new cross-view message-passing scheme, letting information flow between neighboring views. We empirically validate it on the real-world multi-view data set Real-IAD and reach a new state-of-the-art, surpassing current baselines in both image-wise and sample-wise anomaly detection tasks.