# Anomaly Detection by Effectively Leveraging Synthetic Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23227 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23227/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [LightGlue: Local Feature Matching at Light Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13643/) (2023)
- [CutPaste: Self-Supervised Learning for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04015/) (2021)
- [DRAEM -- A discriminatively trained reconstruction embedding for surface anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07610/) (2021)
- [Last Layer Re-Training is Sufficient for Robustness to Spurious Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02937/) (2022)
- [DeSTSeg: Segmentation Guided Denoising Student-Teacher for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11317/) (2022)
- [Natural Synthetic Anomalies for Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15222/) (2021)
- [RealNet: A Feature Selection Network with Realistic Synthetic Anomaly for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05897/) (2024)
- [AnomalyDiffusion: Few-Shot Anomaly Image Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05767/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws of Synthetic Images for Model Training ... for Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04567/) (2023)
- [Defect-GAN: High-Fidelity Defect Synthesis for Automated Defect Inspection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15158/) (2021)
- [MemSeg: A semi-supervised method for image surface defect detection using differences and commonalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00908/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Defect Image Generation via Defect-Aware Feature Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02389/) (2023)
- [Collaborative Discrepancy Optimization for Reliable Image Anomaly Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08769/) (2023)
- [Dual-Interrelated Diffusion Model for Few-Shot Anomaly Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13509/) (2024)
- [SeaS: Few-shot Industrial Anomaly Image Generation with Separation and Sharing Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14987/) (2024)
- [Unseen Visual Anomaly Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01078/) (2024)
- [AnomalyXFusion: Multi-modal Anomaly Synthesis with Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19444/) (2024)
- [From Fake to Real: Pretraining on Balanced Synthetic Images to Prevent Spurious Correlations in Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04553/) (2023)
- [A Novel Approach to Industrial Defect Generation through Blended Latent Diffusion Model with Online Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19330/) (2024)
- [Improving Knowledge Distillation Under Unknown Covariate Shift Through Confidence-Guided Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02294/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Visual Anomaly Synthesis for Model Selection in Data Scarcity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37360/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Anomaly detection plays a vital role in industrial manufacturing. Due to the scarcity of real defect images, unsupervised approaches that rely solely on normal images have been extensively studied. Recently, diffusion-based generative models brought attention to training data synthesis as an alternative solution. In this work, we focus on a strategy to effectively leverage synthetic images to maximize the anomaly detection performance. Previous synthesis strategies are broadly categorized into two groups, presenting a clear trade-off. Rule-based synthesis, such as injecting noise or pasting patches, is cost-effective but often fails to produce realistic defect images. On the other hand, generative model-based synthesis can create high-quality defect images but requires substantial cost. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework that leverages a pre-trained text-guided image-to-image translation model and image retrieval model to efficiently generate synthetic defect images. Specifically, the image retrieval model assesses the similarity of the generated images to real normal images and filters out irrelevant outputs, thereby enhancing the quality and relevance of the generated defect images. To effectively leverage synthetic images, we also introduce a two stage training strategy. In this strategy, the model is first pre-trained on a large volume of images from rule-based synthesis and then fine-tuned on a smaller set of high-quality images. This method significantly reduces the cost for data collection while improving the anomaly detection performance. Experiments on the MVTec AD dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.