PB-IAD: Utilizing multimodal foundation models for semantic industrial anomaly detection in dynamic manufacturing environments

The detection of anomalies in manufacturing processes is crucial to ensure product quality and identify process deviations. Statistical and data-driven approaches remain the standard in industrial anomaly detection, yet their adaptability and usability are constrained by the dependence on extensive annotated datasets and limited flexibility under dynamic production conditions. Recent advances in the perception capabilities of foundation models provide promising opportunities for their adaptation to this downstream task. This paper presents PB-IAD (Prompt-based Industrial Anomaly Detection), a novel framework that leverages the multimodal and reasoning capabilities of foundation models for industrial anomaly detection. Specifically, PB-IAD addresses three key requirements of dynamic production environments: data sparsity, agile adaptability, and domain user centricity. In addition to the anomaly detection, the framework includes a prompt template that is specifically designed for iteratively implementing domain-specific process knowledge, as well as a pre-processing module that translates domain user inputs into effective system prompts. This user-centric design allows domain experts to customise the system flexibly without requiring data science expertise. The proposed framework is evaluated by utilizing GPT-4.1 across three distinct manufacturing scenarios, two data modalities, and an ablation study to systematically assess the contribution of semantic instructions. Furthermore, PB-IAD is benchmarked to state-of-the-art methods for anomaly detection such as PatchCore. The results demonstrate superior performance, particularly in data-sparse scenarios and low-shot settings, achieved solely through semantic instructions.