# Towards Fine-Grained Vision-Language Alignment for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26464 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26464/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [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)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [How Can We Know What Language Models Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12543/) (2019)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [NExT-GPT: Any-to-Any Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05519/) (2023)
- [PaDiM: a Patch Distribution Modeling Framework for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08785/) (2020)
- [DRAEM -- A discriminatively trained reconstruction embedding for surface anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07610/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Sub-Image Anomaly Detection with Deep Pyramid Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02357/) (2020)
- [SimpleNet: A Simple Network for Image Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15140/) (2023)
- [AutoPrompt: Eliciting Knowledge from Language Models with Automatically Generated Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15980/) (2020)
- [Same Same But DifferNet: Semi-Supervised Defect Detection with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12577/) (2020)
- [AnomalyGPT: Detecting Industrial Anomalies Using Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15366/) (2023)
- [InstantStyle: Free Lunch towards Style-Preserving in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02733/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Real-IAD: A Real-World Multi-View Dataset for Benchmarking Versatile Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12580/) (2024)
- [Registration based Few-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07361/) (2022)
- [AdaCLIP: Adapting CLIP with Hybrid Learnable Prompts for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15795/) (2024)
- [PromptAD: Learning Prompts with only Normal Samples for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05231/) (2024)
- [DSR -- A dual subspace re-projection network for surface anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01521/) (2022)
- [Toward Generalist Anomaly Detection via In-context Residual Learning with Few-shot Sample Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06495/) (2024)
- [A Unified Anomaly Synthesis Strategy with Gradient Ascent for Industrial Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09359/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Physical Plausibility Reasoning via HCM-GRPO: Empowering Compact Model for Superior Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10055/) (2025)
- [Large-Scale Universal Defect Generation: Foundation Models and Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08915/) (2026)
- [Text-Guided Multimodal Unified Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22899/) (2026)
- [Anchor and Adapt: Asymmetric Prompt Adaptation for Few-Shot Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07016/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) methods identify anomalous regions with few known normal samples. Most existing methods rely on the generalization ability of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to recognize potentially anomalous regions through feature similarity between text descriptions and images. However, due to the lack of detailed textual descriptions, these methods can only pre-define image-level descriptions to match each visual patch token to identify potential anomalous regions, which leads to the semantic misalignment between image descriptions and patch-level visual anomalies, achieving sub-optimal localization performance. To address the above issues, we propose the Multi-Level Fine-Grained Semantic Caption (MFSC) to provide multi-level and fine-grained textual descriptions for existing anomaly detection datasets with automatic construction pipeline. Based on the MFSC, we propose a novel framework named FineGrainedAD to improve anomaly localization performance, which consists of two components: Multi-Level Learnable Prompt (MLLP) and Multi-Level Semantic Alignment (MLSA). MLLP introduces fine-grained semantics into multi-level learnable prompts through automatic replacement and concatenation mechanism, while MLSA designs region aggregation strategy and multi-level alignment training to facilitate learnable prompts better align with corresponding visual regions. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed FineGrainedAD achieves superior overall performance in few-shot settings on MVTec-AD and VisA datasets.