# How Much Does Machine Identity Matter in Anomalous Sound Detection at Test Time?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16253 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16253/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2026.

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

- [Out of Context: Reliability in Multimodal Anomaly Detection Requires Contextual Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13252/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Anomalous sound detection (ASD) benchmarks typically assume that the identity of the monitored machine is known at test time and that recordings are evaluated in a machine-wise manner. However, in realistic monitoring scenarios with multiple known machines operating concurrently, test recordings may not be reliably attributable to a specific machine, and requiring machine identity imposes deployment constraints such as dedicated sensors per machine. To reveal performance degradations and method-specific differences in robustness that are hidden under standard machine-wise evaluation, we consider a minimal modification of the ASD evaluation protocol in which test recordings from multiple machines are merged and evaluated jointly without access to machine identity at inference time. Training data and evaluation metrics remain unchanged, and machine identity labels are used only for post hoc evaluation. Experiments with representative ASD methods show that relaxing this assumption reveals performance degradations and method-specific differences in robustness that are hidden under standard machine-wise evaluation, and that these degradations are strongly related to implicit machine identification accuracy.