# Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection in Battery Thermal Images Using Visual Question Answering with Prior Knowledge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16674 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16674/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [PaDiM: a Patch Distribution Modeling Framework for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08785/) (2020)
- [CFLOW-AD: Real-Time Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Localization via Conditional Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12571/) (2021)
- [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)
- [EfficientAD: Accurate Visual Anomaly Detection at Millisecond-Level Latencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14535/) (2023)
- [Student-Teacher Feature Pyramid Matching for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04257/) (2021)
- [CFA: Coupled-hypersphere-based Feature Adaptation for Target-Oriented Anomaly Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04325/) (2022)
- [From Images to Textual Prompts: Zero-shot VQA with Frozen Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10846/) (2022)
- [Probabilistic Modeling of Deep Features for Out-of-Distribution and Adversarial Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11786/) (2019)
- [GPT-4V-AD: Exploring Grounding Potential of VQA-oriented GPT-4V for Zero-shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02612/) (2023)
- [Paraphrase Types Elicit Prompt Engineering Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19898/) (2024)
- [Exploiting Autoencoder's Weakness to Generate Pseudo Anomalies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05886/) (2024)
- [Multi-Agents Based on Large Language Models for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18351/) (2024)
- [Overcoming limited battery data challenges: A coupled neural network approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15348/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Batteries are essential for various applications, including electric vehicles and renewable energy storage, making safety and efficiency critical concerns. Anomaly detection in battery thermal images helps identify failures early, but traditional deep learning methods require extensive labeled data, which is difficult to obtain, especially for anomalies due to safety risks and high data collection costs. To overcome this, we explore zero-shot anomaly detection using Visual Question Answering (VQA) models, which leverage pretrained knowledge and textbased prompts to generalize across vision tasks. By incorporating prior knowledge of normal battery thermal behavior, we design prompts to detect anomalies without battery-specific training data. We evaluate three VQA models (ChatGPT-4o, LLaVa-13b, and BLIP-2) analyzing their robustness to prompt variations, repeated trials, and qualitative outputs. Despite the lack of finetuning on battery data, our approach demonstrates competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art models that are trained with the battery data. Our findings highlight the potential of VQA-based zero-shot learning for battery anomaly detection and suggest future directions for improving its effectiveness.