# Identifying the Unknown: Prompt-Free Open Vocabulary Anomaly Recognition for Robot-Object Interaction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26829 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26829/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jun 2026.

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

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [RegionCLIP: Region-based Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09106/) (2021)
- [DRAEM -- A discriminatively trained reconstruction embedding for surface anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07610/) (2021)
- [YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17270/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10678/) (2020)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09683/) (2023)
- [Recognize Anything: A Strong Image Tagging Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03514/) (2023)
- [Data Filtering Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17425/) (2023)
- [DetCLIPv3: Towards Versatile Generative Open-vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09216/) (2024)
- [MAEDAY: MAE for few and zero shot AnomalY-Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14307/) (2022)
- [AnoViT: Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Localization with Vision Transformer-based Encoder-Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10808/) (2022)
- [Unconstrained Open Vocabulary Image Classification: Zero-Shot Transfer from Text to Image via CLIP Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11211/) (2024)
- [Shaken, Not Stirred: A Novel Dataset for Visual Understanding of Glasses in Human-Robot Bartending Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04308/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robots operating in real-world environments must in general be able to recognize previously unseen objects. As robotic systems move toward open-world autonomy, there is a growing, yet largely unmet, need for open vocabulary object detectors that are prompt-free and efficient enough for continuous deployment. We present AnomNOVIC, a two-stage known-workspace framework that combines a masked autoencoder (MAE) trained for anomaly detection, with NOVIC, a powerful real-time prompt-free open vocabulary image classifier. The MAE produces generic object-agnostic bounding boxes, allowing NOVIC to classify salient image regions without requiring a predefined candidate class list. We evaluate AnomNOVIC against strong open vocabulary baselines in a tabletop robot-object environment featuring the NICOL humanoid robot, reaching 47.1% AP / 57.5% AP50 for prompt-free recognition, and 59.0% AP / 72.5% AP50 if class candidates are provided. Across additional datasets, including an in-the-wild test set with 48 unique objects, AnomNOVIC reaches up to 82.6% prompt-free detection and classification accuracy. These results significantly surpass all tested open vocabulary baselines, including YOLO-World-v2, OWLv2, and YOLOE.