# Plan First, Judge Later, Run Better: A DMAIC-Inspired Agentic System for Industrial Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04599 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04599/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 17 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Software engineering coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/software-engineering-coding-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [A Unifying Review of Deep and Shallow Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11732/) (2020)
- [Detecting Spacecraft Anomalies Using LSTMs and Nonparametric Dynamic Thresholding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04431/) (2018)
- [Anomaly Transformer: Time Series Anomaly Detection with Association Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02642/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for Anomaly Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03407/) (2019)
- [Why Normalizing Flows Fail to Detect Out-of-Distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08545/) (2020)
- [A Multimodal Anomaly Detector for Robot-Assisted Feeding Using an LSTM-based Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00614/) (2017)
- [Deep Time Series Models: A Comprehensive Survey and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13278/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Self-Evolving AI Agents: A New Paradigm Bridging Foundation Models and Lifelong Agentic Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07407/) (2025)
- [Deep Industrial Image Anomaly Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11514/) (2023)
- [BOND: Benchmarking Unsupervised Outlier Node Detection on Static Attributed Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10071/) (2022)
- [Learning to Plan & Reason for Evaluation with Thinking-LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18099/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Algorithms for Industrial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11161/) (2022)
- [Argos: Agentic Time-Series Anomaly Detection with Autonomous Rule Generation via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14170/) (2025)
- [AD-AGENT: A Multi-agent Framework for End-to-end Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12594/) (2025)
- [Anomaly Detection for Industrial Applications, Its Challenges, Solutions, and Future Directions: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11310/) (2025)
- [Prescriptive Agents based on RAG for Automated Maintenance (PARAM)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04714/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model (LLM) agents have shown promise in automating complex data-analysis workflows, but their reliable deployment remains challenging in high-stakes industrial scenarios. Industrial anomaly detection (IAD) is essential for manufacturing quality, safety, and efficiency, yet existing LLM-based IAD agents mainly focus on execution while under-exploiting strategy formulation. Consequently, they struggle to handle heterogeneous modalities in a unified and cost-effective manner. Inspired by the DMAIC quality-management framework, we propose DMAIC-IAD (DMAIC-inspired Agentic Industrial Anomaly Detection), a "Plan First, Judge Later" multi-agent system that aligns LLM agents with structured industrial problem-solving. DMAIC-IAD distills heterogeneous references into standardized operating procedures (SOPs) before strategy generation, and introduces a pre-trained execution-free judge model to rank candidate strategies without costly runtime trials. Extensive experiments across four modalities show that DMAIC-IAD improves average detection performance over applicable agentic baselines by 37.76%.