English

Anomalous Samples for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

Machine Learning 2025-08-01 v1

Abstract

Several anomaly detection and classification methods rely on large amounts of non-anomalous or "normal" samples under the assump- tion that anomalous data is typically harder to acquire. This hypothesis becomes questionable in Few-Shot settings, where as little as one anno- tated sample can make a significant difference. In this paper, we tackle the question of utilizing anomalous samples in training a model for bi- nary anomaly classification. We propose a methodology that incorporates anomalous samples in a multi-score anomaly detection score leveraging recent Zero-Shot and memory-based techniques. We compare the utility of anomalous samples to that of regular samples and study the benefits and limitations of each. In addition, we propose an augmentation-based validation technique to optimize the aggregation of the different anomaly scores and demonstrate its effectiveness on popular industrial anomaly detection datasets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.23712,
  title  = {Anomalous Samples for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection},
  author = {Aymane Abdali and Bartosz Boguslawski and Lucas Drumetz and Vincent Gripon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.23712},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:28:10.231Z