# PiCo: Active Manifold Canonicalization for Robust Robotic Visual Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23122 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23122/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Deep Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00410/) (2016)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [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)
- [SimpleNet: A Simple Network for Image Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15140/) (2023)
- [EfficientAD: Accurate Visual Anomaly Detection at Millisecond-Level Latencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14535/) (2023)
- [Real-IAD: A Real-World Multi-View Dataset for Benchmarking Versatile Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12580/) (2024)
- [CFA: Coupled-hypersphere-based Feature Adaptation for Target-Oriented Anomaly Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04325/) (2022)
- [Dinomaly: The Less Is More Philosophy in Multi-Class Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14325/) (2024)
- [The Conditional Entropy Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05379/) (2020)
- [Hire-MLP: Vision MLP via Hierarchical Rearrangement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13341/) (2021)
- [Exploring Intrinsic Normal Prototypes within a Single Image for Universal Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02424/) (2025)
- [A Canonicalization Perspective on Invariant and Equivariant Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18378/) (2024)
- [MSFlow: Multi-Scale Flow-based Framework for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15300/) (2023)
- [An End-to-End Robust Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation Network with Single-Step Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16308/) (2024)
- [Robust Single-Stage Fully Sparse 3D Object Detection via Detachable Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03252/) (2025)
- [Recognizable Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14618/) (2023)
- [DI-Retinex: Digital-Imaging Retinex Theory for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03327/) (2024)
- [Visual Anomaly Detection under Complex View-Illumination Interplay: A Large-Scale Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10996/) (2025)
- [CNMBI: Determining the Number of Clusters Using Center Pairwise Matching and Boundary Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26744/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Industrial deployment of robotic visual anomaly detection (VAD) is fundamentally constrained by passive perception under diverse 6-DoF pose configurations and unstable operating conditions such as illumination changes and shadows, where intrinsic semantic anomalies and physical disturbances coexist and interact. To overcome these limitations, a paradigm shift from passive feature learning to Active Canonicalization is proposed. PiCo (Pose-in-Condition Canonicalization) is introduced as a unified framework that actively projects observations onto a condition-invariant canonical manifold. PiCo operates through a cascaded mechanism. The first stage, Active Physical Canonicalization, enables a robotic agent to reorient objects in order to reduce geometric uncertainty at its source. The second stage, Neural Latent Canonicalization, adopts a three-stage denoising hierarchy consisting of photometric processing at the input level, latent refinement at the feature level, and contextual reasoning at the semantic level, progressively eliminating nuisance factors across representational scales. Extensive evaluations on the large-scale M2AD benchmark demonstrate the superiority of this paradigm. PiCo achieves a state-of-the-art 93.7% O-AUROC, representing a 3.7% improvement over prior methods in static settings, and attains 98.5% accuracy in active closed-loop scenarios. These results demonstrate that active manifold canonicalization is critical for robust embodied perception.