English

Towards One-for-All Anomaly Detection for Tabular Data

Machine Learning 2026-03-17 v1

Abstract

Tabular anomaly detection (TAD) aims to identify samples that deviate from the majority in tabular data and is critical in many real-world applications. However, existing methods follow a ``one model for one dataset (OFO)'' paradigm, which relies on dataset-specific training and thus incurs high computational cost and yields limited generalization to unseen domains. To address these limitations, we propose OFA-TAD, a generalist one-for-all (OFA) TAD framework that only requires one-time training on multiple source datasets and can generalize to unseen datasets from diverse domains on-the-fly. To realize one-for-all tabular anomaly detection, OFA-TAD extracts neighbor-distance patterns as transferable cues, and introduces multi-view neighbor-distance representations from multiple transformation-induced metric spaces to mitigate the transformation sensitivity of distance profiles. To adaptively combine multi-view distance evidence, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scoring network is employed for view-specific anomaly scoring and entropy-regularized gated fusion, with a multi-strategy anomaly synthesis mechanism to support training under the one-class constraint. Extensive experiments on 34 datasets from 14 domains demonstrate that OFA-TAD achieves superior anomaly detection performance and strong cross-domain generalizability under the strict OFA setting.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.14407,
  title  = {Towards One-for-All Anomaly Detection for Tabular Data},
  author = {Shiyuan Li and Yixin Liu and Yu Zheng and Xiaofeng Cao and Shirui Pan and Heng Tao Shen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.14407},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:20:45.537Z