Physics-inspired Pseudo Anomaly Generation and Prototype Feature Guidance for 3D Anomaly Detection

3D point cloud anomaly detection plays a vital role in industrial manufacturing, yet it faces significant challenges due to the scarcity and high acquisition cost of real anomalous samples. The inherently anomaly-free training data further hinders detection methods from effectively learning discriminative features between normal and abnormal instances. To address these issues, we propose PA3AD, a novel framework that introduces a physics-inspired pseudo-anomaly generation strategy to create physically plausible anomalous samples from normal data. Additionally, we incorporate prototype features via a weight-sharing mechanism to guide the model in capturing the distribution shifts between normal and anomalous samples. Specifically, PA3AD introduces two key innovations to tackle the scarcity of real anomalies. First, a physics-inspired module generates diverse pseudo-anomalous point clouds from normal data via multi-physics modeling. Second, momentum-updated prototypes and a difference-aware fusion block capture stable normal representations and their discrepancies with pseudo-anomalies. This design effectively learns distribution shifts, achieving superior detection performance. Extensive experiments on the Anomaly-ShapeNet and Real3D-AD datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/NingxiaoJian/PA3AD.