LR-IAD:Mask-Free Industrial Anomaly Detection with Logical Reasoning

Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) is critical for ensuring product quality by identifying defects. Traditional methods such as feature embedding and reconstruction-based approaches require large datasets and struggle with scalability. Existing vision-language models (VLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) address some limitations but rely on mask annotations, leading to high implementation costs and false positives. Additionally, industrial datasets like MVTec-AD and VisA suffer from severe class imbalance, with defect samples constituting only 23.8% and 11.1% of total data respectively. To address these challenges, we propose a reward function that dynamically prioritizes rare defect patterns during training to handle class imbalance. We also introduce a mask-free reasoning framework using Chain of Thought (CoT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) mechanisms, enabling anomaly detection directly from raw images without annotated masks. This approach generates interpretable step-by-step explanations for defect localization. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming prior approaches by 36% in accuracy on MVTec-AD and 16% on VisA. By eliminating mask dependency and reducing costs while providing explainable outputs, this work advances industrial anomaly detection and supports scalable quality control in manufacturing. Code to reproduce the experiment is available at https://github.com/LilaKen/LR-IAD.