Universal Transformation of One-Class Classifiers for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

📅 2026-02-13
📈 Citations: 0
✨ Influential: 0
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Technology Category

Machine Learning: Unsupervised & Self-Supervised LearningData Mining & Knowledge Management: Anomaly/Outlier DetectionComputer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness

Application Category

Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasetsWeb Mining and Content Analysis: Normalization, clustering, classification, and summarization of Web textGraph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Representation, reconstruction, and subgraph or motif discovery in Web-related graphs
📝 Abstract
Detecting anomalies in images and video is an essential task for multiple real-world problems, including industrial inspection, computer-assisted diagnosis, and environmental monitoring. Anomaly detection is typically formulated as a one-class classification problem, where the training data consists solely of nominal values, leaving methods built on this assumption susceptible to training label noise. We present a dataset folding method that transforms an arbitrary one-class classifier-based anomaly detector into a fully unsupervised method. This is achieved by making a set of key weak assumptions: that anomalies are uncommon in the training dataset and generally heterogeneous. These assumptions enable us to utilize multiple independently trained instances of a one-class classifier to filter the training dataset for anomalies. This transformation requires no modifications to the underlying anomaly detector; the only changes are algorithmically selected data subsets used for training. We demonstrate that our method can transform a wide variety of one-class classifier anomaly detectors for both images and videos into unsupervised ones. Our method creates the first unsupervised logical anomaly detectors by transforming existing methods. We also demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised anomaly detection on the MVTec AD, ViSA, and MVTec Loco AD datasets. As improvements to one-class classifiers are made, our method directly transfers those improvements to the unsupervised domain, linking the domains.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

anomaly detection
one-class classification
unsupervised learning
label noise
training data contamination
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

dataset folding
one-class classification
unsupervised anomaly detection
training label noise
heterogeneous anomalies
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D
Declan McIntosh
University of Victoria, B.C., Canada
A
Alexandra Branzan Albu
University of Victoria, B.C., Canada