# A Feature Shuffling and Restoration Strategy for Universal Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22861 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22861/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Memorizing Normality to Detect Anomaly: Memory-augmented Deep Autoencoder for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02639/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Anomaly Detection via Reverse Distillation from One-Class Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10703/) (2022)
- [GANomaly: Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection via Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06725/) (2018)
- [Uninformed Students: Student-Teacher Anomaly Detection with Discriminative Latent Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02357/) (2019)
- [Multiresolution Knowledge Distillation for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11108/) (2020)
- [A Unified Model for Multi-class Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03687/) (2022)
- [Improving Unsupervised Defect Segmentation by Applying Structural Similarity to Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02011/) (2018)
- [SimpleNet: A Simple Network for Image Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15140/) (2023)
- [VT-ADL: A Vision Transformer Network for Image Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10036/) (2021)
- [Patch SVDD: Patch-level SVDD for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16067/) (2020)
- [Same Same But DifferNet: Semi-Supervised Defect Detection with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12577/) (2020)
- [Registration based Few-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07361/) (2022)
- [Modeling the Distribution of Normal Data in Pre-Trained Deep Features for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14140/) (2020)
- [Dinomaly: The Less Is More Philosophy in Multi-Class Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14325/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Vector Quantized Transformer for Multi-class Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14228/) (2023)
- [A Hierarchical Transformation-Discriminating Generative Model for Few Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14535/) (2021)
- [DFR: Deep Feature Reconstruction for Unsupervised Anomaly Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07122/) (2020)
- [Exploring Intrinsic Normal Prototypes within a Single Image for Universal Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02424/) (2025)
- [Focus the Discrepancy: Intra- and Inter-Correlation Learning for Image Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02983/) (2023)
- [ReConPatch : Contrastive Patch Representation Learning for Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16713/) (2023)
- [TrustMAE: A Noise-Resilient Defect Classification Framework using Memory-Augmented Auto-Encoders with Trust Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14629/) (2020)
- [A Feature Memory Rearrangement Network for Visual Inspection of Textured Surface Defects Toward Edge Intelligent Manufacturing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10830/) (2022)
- [AMI-Net: Adaptive Mask Inpainting Network for Industrial Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11802/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised anomaly detection is vital in industrial fields, with reconstruction-based methods favored for their simplicity and effectiveness. However, reconstruction methods often encounter an identical shortcut issue, where both normal and anomalous regions can be well reconstructed and fail to identify outliers. The severity of this problem increases with the complexity of the normal data distribution. Consequently, existing methods may exhibit excellent detection performance in a specific scenario, but their performance sharply declines when transferred to another scenario. This paper focuses on establishing a universal model applicable to anomaly detection tasks across different settings, termed as universal anomaly detection. In this work, we introduce a novel, straightforward yet efficient framework for universal anomaly detection: ulineFeature ulineShuffling and ulineRestoration (FSR), which can alleviate the identical shortcut issue across different settings. First and foremost, FSR employs multi-scale features with rich semantic information as reconstruction targets, rather than raw image pixels. Subsequently, these multi-scale features are partitioned into non-overlapping feature blocks, which are randomly shuffled and then restored to their original state using a restoration network. This simple paradigm encourages the model to focus more on global contextual information. Additionally, we introduce a novel concept, the shuffling rate, to regulate the complexity of the FSR task, thereby alleviating the identical shortcut across different settings. Furthermore, we provide theoretical explanations for the effectiveness of FSR framework from two perspectives: network structure and mutual information. Extensive experimental results validate the superiority and efficiency of the FSR framework across different settings.Code is available at https://github.com/luow23/FSR.