# IAD-Unify: Task-Specific Interfaces for Industrial Anomaly Understanding, Segmentation, and Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12440 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12440/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [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)
- [EfficientAD: Accurate Visual Anomaly Detection at Millisecond-Level Latencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14535/) (2023)
- [AnomalyDiffusion: Few-Shot Anomaly Image Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05767/) (2023)
- [AnomalyDINO: Boosting Patch-based Few-shot Anomaly Detection with DINOv2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14529/) (2024)
- [Dual-Interrelated Diffusion Model for Few-Shot Anomaly Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13509/) (2024)
- [OmniAD: Detect and Understand Industrial Anomaly via Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22039/) (2025)
- [MAU-GPT: Enhancing Multi-type Industrial Anomaly Understanding via Anomaly-aware and Generalist Experts Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07011/) (2026)
- [AD-Copilot: A Vision-Language Assistant for Industrial Anomaly Detection via Visual In-context Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13779/) (2026)

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

- [InstructSAM: Segment Any Instance with Any Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26102/) (2026)
- [O-VAD: Industrial Video Anomaly Detection through Object-Centric Tracking and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18142/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Industrial anomaly inspection requires complementary capabilities: explaining an observed defect, localizing its pixels, and synthesizing a controlled edit. We present IAD-Unify, a unified architecture connecting a multimodal language model (MLLM), dense visual expert, and diffusion editor through task-specific token interfaces. A multi-reference DINOv2 pathway forms a dense anomaly field and compresses its 1,369 cells into 81 structured evidence tokens. Qwen3.5 consumes these tokens for grounded answers and, with 32 task tokens, converts them into a semantic residual over the dense mask. A separate 256-query interface resamples Qwen states into Stable Diffusion's complete cross-attention context, while the editor retains its source latent and hard-mask inputs. The task pathways share one Qwen adaptation without forcing every task through the same visual bottleneck; in particular, evidence tokens are excluded from the generation pathway. Staged optimization initializes dense evidence, aligns it with language, calibrates segmentation, and then pretrains and specializes the diffusion editor while preserving earlier capabilities. We also construct Anomaly Evidence over 54,501 deduplicated industrial images. Its quality-controlled Anomaly Evidence Compiler and Industrial Edit-Pair Compiler produce family-disjoint, validated supervision through independent geometry, semantic-grounding, and edit-consistency checks. This design provides one fixed shared parameter set for understanding, segmentation, and localized generation without conflating their inputs, supervision, or outputs. The resulting model reaches 73.02% MMAD Macro7, the highest listed public segmentation AP average (57.10%) with one reference, and the lowest Controlled masked DINO distance (0.3765), with complementary strengths across reasoning, pixel ranking, and semantic edit fidelity.