The challenge of adapting an anomaly detector to drift in the normal data distribution, especially when no training data is available for the "new normal", has

Oracle pruning, which selects unimportant weights by minimizing the pruned train loss, has been taken as the foundation for most neural network pruning methods for over 35 years, while few (if not none) have thought about how much the foundation really holds. This paper, for the first time, attempts to examine its validity on modern deep models through empirical correlation analyses and provide reflections on the field of neural network pruning. Specifically, for a typical pruning algorithm with three stages (pertaining, pruning, and retraining), we analyze the model performance correlation before and after retraining. Extensive experiments (37K models are trained) across a wide spectrum of models (LeNet5, VGG, ResNets, ViT, MLLM) and datasets (MNIST and its variants, CIFAR10/CIFAR100, ImageNet-1K, MLLM data) are conducted. The results lead to a surprising conclusion: on modern deep learning models, the performance before retraining is barely correlated with the performance after retraining. Namely, the weights selected by oracle pruning can hardly guarantee a good performance after retraining. This further implies that existing works using oracle pruning to derive pruning criteria may be groundless from the beginning. Further studies suggest the rising task complexity is one factor that makes oracle pruning invalid nowadays. Finally, given the evidence, we argue that the retraining stage in a pruning algorithm should be accounted for when developing any pruning criterion.

Semi-supervised anomaly detection for sensor signals is critical in ensuring system reliability in smart manufacturing. However, existing methods rely heavily on data correlation, neglecting causality and leading to potential misinterpretations due to confounding factors. Moreover, while current reinforcement learning-based methods can effectively identify known and unknown anomalies with limited labeled samples, these methods still face several challenges, such as under-utilization of priori knowledge, lack of model flexibility, and deficient reward feedback during environmental interactions. To address the above problems, this paper innovatively constructs a counterfactual causal reinforcement learning model, termed Triple-Assisted Causal Reinforcement Learning Anomaly Detector (Tri-CRLAD). The model leverages causal inference to extract the intrinsic causal feature in data, enhancing the agent's utilization of prior knowledge and improving its generalization capability. In addition, Tri-CRLAD features a triple decision support mechanism, including a sampling strategy based on historical similarity, an adaptive threshold smoothing adjustment strategy, and an adaptive decision reward mechanism. These mechanisms further enhance the flexibility and generalization ability of the model, enabling it to effectively respond to various complex and dynamically changing environments. Experimental results across seven diverse sensor signal datasets demonstrate that Tri-CRLAD outperforms nine state-of-the-art baseline methods. Notably, Tri-CRLAD achieves up to a 23\% improvement in anomaly detection stability with minimal known anomaly samples, highlighting its potential in semi-supervised anomaly detection scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/Aoudsung/Tri-CRLAD.

Anomaly detection (AD) plays a crucial role in many safety-critical application domains. The challenge of adapting an anomaly detector to drift in the normal data distribution, especially when no training data is available for the "new normal", has led to the development of zero-shot AD techniques. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method called Adaptive Centered Representations (ACR) for zero-shot batch-level AD. Our approach trains off-the-shelf deep anomaly detectors (such as deep SVDD) to adapt to a set of inter-related training data distributions in combination with batch normalization, enabling automatic zero-shot generalization for unseen AD tasks. This simple recipe, batch normalization plus meta-training, is a highly effective and versatile tool. Our theoretical results guarantee the zero-shot generalization for unseen AD tasks; our empirical results demonstrate the first zero-shot AD results for tabular data and outperform existing methods in zero-shot anomaly detection and segmentation on image data from specialized domains.

Time series anomaly detection is crucial for industrial monitoring services that handle a large volume of data, aiming to ensure reliability and optimize system performance. Existing methods often require extensive labeled resources and manual parameter selection, highlighting the need for automation. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework for automatic parameter optimization in time series anomaly detection models. The framework introduces three optimization targets: prediction score, shape score, and sensitivity score, which can be easily adapted to different model backbones without prior knowledge or manual labeling efforts. The proposed framework has been successfully applied online for over six months, serving more than 50,000 time series every minute. It simplifies the user's experience by requiring only an expected sensitive value, offering a user-friendly interface, and achieving desired detection results. Extensive evaluations conducted on public datasets and comparison with other methods further confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

One-class classification has been a prevailing method in building deep anomaly detection models under the assumption that a dataset consisting of normal samples is available. In practice, however, abnormal samples are often mixed in a training dataset, and they detrimentally affect the training of deep models, which limits their applicability. For robust normality learning of deep practical models, we propose an unsupervised deep one-class classification that learns normality from pseudo-labeled normal samples, i.e., outlier detection in single cluster scenarios. To this end, we propose a pseudo-labeling method by an adaptive threshold selected by ranking-based training dynamics. The experiments on 10 anomaly detection benchmarks show that our method effectively improves performance on anomaly detection by sizable margins.

Anomaly detection (AD), separating anomalies from normal data, has many applications across domains, from security to healthcare. While most previous works were shown to be effective for cases with fully or partially labeled data, that setting is in practice less common due to labeling being particularly tedious for this task. In this paper, we focus on fully unsupervised AD, in which the entire training dataset, containing both normal and anomalous samples, is unlabeled. To tackle this problem effectively, we propose to improve the robustness of one-class classification trained on self-supervised representations using a data refinement process. Our proposed data refinement approach is based on an ensemble of one-class classifiers (OCCs), each of which is trained on a disjoint subset of training data. Representations learned by self-supervised learning on the refined data are iteratively updated as the data refinement improves. We demonstrate our method on various unsupervised AD tasks with image and tabular data. With a 10% anomaly ratio on CIFAR-10 image data / 2.5% anomaly ratio on Thyroid tabular data, the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art one-class classifier by 6.3 AUC and 12.5 average precision / 22.9 F1-score.

Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) is an important data mining task with numerous applications in the IoT era. In recent years, a large number of deep neural network-based methods have been proposed, demonstrating significantly better performance than conventional methods on addressing challenging TSAD problems in a variety of areas. Nevertheless, these deep TSAD methods typically rely on a clean training dataset that is not polluted by anomalies to learn the "normal profile" of the underlying dynamics. This requirement is nontrivial since a clean dataset can hardly be provided in practice. Moreover, without the awareness of their robustness, blindly applying deep TSAD methods with potentially contaminated training data can possibly incur significant performance degradation in the detection phase. In this work, to tackle this important challenge, we firstly investigate the robustness of commonly used deep TSAD methods with contaminated training data which provides a guideline for applying these methods when the provided training data are not guaranteed to be anomaly-free. Furthermore, we propose a model-agnostic method which can effectively improve the robustness of learning mainstream deep TSAD models with potentially contaminated data. Experiment results show that our method can consistently prevent or mitigate performance degradation of mainstream deep TSAD models on widely used benchmark datasets.