Distribution Prototype Diffusion Learning for Open-set Supervised Anomaly Detection

In Open-set Supervised Anomaly Detection (OSAD), the existing methods typically generate pseudo anomalies to compensate for the scarcity of observed anomaly samples, while overlooking critical priors of normal samples, leading to less effective discriminative boundaries. To address this issue, we propose a Distribution Prototype Diffusion Learning (DPDL) method aimed at enclosing normal samples within a compact and discriminative distribution space. Specifically, we construct multiple learnable Gaussian prototypes to create a latent representation space for abundant and diverse normal samples and learn a Schrödinger bridge to facilitate a diffusive transition toward these prototypes for normal samples while steering anomaly samples away. Moreover, to enhance inter-sample separation, we design a dispersion feature learning way in hyperspherical space, which benefits the identification of out-of-distribution anomalies. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed DPDL, achieving state-of-the-art performance on 9 public datasets.

@article{wang2025_2502.20981,
  title={ Distribution Prototype Diffusion Learning for Open-set Supervised Anomaly Detection },
  author={ Fuyun Wang and Tong Zhang and Yuanzhi Wang and Yide Qiu and Xin Liu and Xu Guo and Zhen Cui },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.20981},
  year={ 2025 }
}