English

Self-Supervised Losses for One-Class Textual Anomaly Detection

Computation and Language 2022-04-13 v1

Abstract

Current deep learning methods for anomaly detection in text rely on supervisory signals in inliers that may be unobtainable or bespoke architectures that are difficult to tune. We study a simpler alternative: fine-tuning Transformers on the inlier data with self-supervised objectives and using the losses as an anomaly score. Overall, the self-supervision approach outperforms other methods under various anomaly detection scenarios, improving the AUROC score on semantic anomalies by 11.6% and on syntactic anomalies by 22.8% on average. Additionally, the optimal objective and resultant learnt representation depend on the type of downstream anomaly. The separability of anomalies and inliers signals that a representation is more effective for detecting semantic anomalies, whilst the presence of narrow feature directions signals a representation that is effective for detecting syntactic anomalies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.05695,
  title  = {Self-Supervised Losses for One-Class Textual Anomaly Detection},
  author = {Kimberly T. Mai and Toby Davies and Lewis D. Griffin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.05695},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:45:39.614Z