Multi-Modal Anomaly Detection: A Survey
arXiv:2608.24937v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-Modal Anomaly Detection (MMAD) detects rare abnormal events from heterogeneous data sources and is increasingly used in safety- and reliability-critical applications such as industrial inspection and cybersecurity. Yet the literature is fragmented across domains and modality combinations, and existing surveys usually group methods by architecture rather than by how abnormality is defined and separated in multi-modal settings. We survey MMAD from an assumption-driven perspective. We formalize the problem, identify five intrinsic characteristics underlying its core challenges, and organize prior work into two complementary paradigms. The first, normality-assumption methods, models regularity via representation learning, cross-modal alignment, and knowledge enhancement. The second, anomaly-assumption methods, sharpens decision boundaries through coarse-grained, structural, and semantic anomaly injection. We also investigate how foundation models are reshaping MMAD through scalable pretraining, flexible cross-modal transfer, and emerging reasoning capabilities. Finally, we compile representative benchmarks and evaluation protocols across domains and highlight open problems and future directions for robust, adaptive, and interpretable MMAD systems.
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[Submitted on 24 Aug 2026]
Title:Multi-Modal Anomaly Detection: A Survey
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Abstract:Multi-Modal Anomaly Detection (MMAD) detects rare abnormal events from heterogeneous data sources and is increasingly used in safety- and reliability-critical applications such as industrial inspection and cybersecurity. Yet the literature is fragmented across domains and modality combinations, and existing surveys usually group methods by architecture rather than by how abnormality is defined and separated in multi-modal settings. We survey MMAD from an assumption-driven perspective. We formalize the problem, identify five intrinsic characteristics underlying its core challenges, and organize prior work into two complementary paradigms. The first, normality-assumption methods, models regularity via representation learning, cross-modal alignment, and knowledge enhancement. The second, anomaly-assumption methods, sharpens decision boundaries through coarse-grained, structural, and semantic anomaly injection. We also investigate how foundation models are reshaping MMAD through scalable pretraining, flexible cross-modal transfer, and emerging reasoning capabilities. Finally, we compile representative benchmarks and evaluation protocols across domains and highlight open problems and future directions for robust, adaptive, and interpretable MMAD systems.
Comments: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Big Data
Subjects:
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.24937 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2608.24937v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.24937
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Xudong Mou [view email] [v1] Mon, 24 Aug 2026 01:53:22 UTC (2,288 KB)
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