# Prototypical Learning Guided Context-Aware Segmentation Network for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15319 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15319/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2025.

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

- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [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)
- [CutPaste: Self-Supervised Learning for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04015/) (2021)
- [PANet: Few-Shot Image Semantic Segmentation with Prototype Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06391/) (2019)
- [Anomaly Detection via Reverse Distillation from One-Class Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10703/) (2022)
- [Uninformed Students: Student-Teacher Anomaly Detection with Discriminative Latent Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02357/) (2019)
- [An Intriguing Failing of Convolutional Neural Networks and the CoordConv Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03247/) (2018)
- [Sub-Image Anomaly Detection with Deep Pyramid Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02357/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Prototype Learning and Allocation for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01893/) (2021)
- [Student-Teacher Feature Pyramid Matching for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04257/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation: A Prototype View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15102/) (2022)
- [CFA: Coupled-hypersphere-based Feature Adaptation for Target-Oriented Anomaly Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04325/) (2022)
- [Registration based Few-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07361/) (2022)
- [Natural Synthetic Anomalies for Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15222/) (2021)
- [Pushing the Limits of Fewshot Anomaly Detection in Industry Vision: Graphcore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12082/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Localization in Industrial Images: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10298/) (2022)
- [IM-IAD: Industrial Image Anomaly Detection Benchmark in Manufacturing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13359/) (2023)
- [ReContrast: Domain-Specific Anomaly Detection via Contrastive Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02602/) (2023)
- [A Hierarchical Transformation-Discriminating Generative Model for Few Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14535/) (2021)
- [Collaborative Discrepancy Optimization for Reliable Image Anomaly Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08769/) (2023)
- [Detecting Outliers with Foreign Patch Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04197/) (2020)
- [Detecting Outliers with Poisson Image Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02622/) (2021)
- [Feature Encoding with AutoEncoders for Weakly-supervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10500/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Anomaly Detection via Category-Agnostic Registration Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08810/) (2024)
- [Few-Shot Anomaly Detection with Adversarial Loss for Robust Feature Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03005/) (2023)
- [Bidirectional Multimodal Prompt Learning with Scale-Aware Training for Few-Shot Multi-Class Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13516/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [VTFusion: A Vision-Text Multimodal Fusion Network for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16381/) (2026)
- [AnyAD: Unified Any-Modality Anomaly Detection in Incomplete Multi-Sequence MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21264/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) denotes the identification of anomalies within a target category with a limited number of normal samples. Existing FSAD methods largely rely on pre-trained feature representations to detect anomalies, but the inherent domain gap between pre-trained representations and target FSAD scenarios is often overlooked. This study proposes a Prototypical Learning Guided Context-Aware Segmentation Network (PCSNet) to address the domain gap, thereby improving feature descriptiveness in target scenarios and enhancing FSAD performance. In particular, PCSNet comprises a prototypical feature adaption (PFA) sub-network and a context-aware segmentation (CAS) sub-network. PFA extracts prototypical features as guidance to ensure better feature compactness for normal data while distinct separation from anomalies. A pixel-level disparity classification loss is also designed to make subtle anomalies more distinguishable. Then a CAS sub-network is introduced for pixel-level anomaly localization, where pseudo anomalies are exploited to facilitate the training process. Experimental results on MVTec and MPDD demonstrate the superior FSAD performance of PCSNet, with 94.9% and 80.2% image-level AUROC in an 8-shot scenario, respectively. Real-world applications on automotive plastic part inspection further demonstrate that PCSNet can achieve promising results with limited training samples. Code is available at https://github.com/yuxin-jiang/PCSNet.