Not All Regions Are Equal: Attention-Guided Perturbation Network for Industrial Anomaly Detection

Abstract

In unsupervised image anomaly detection, reconstruction methods aim to train models to capture normal patterns comprehensively for normal data reconstruction. Yet, these models sometimes retain unintended reconstruction capacity for anomalous regions during inference, leading to missed detections. To mitigate this issue, existing works perturb normal samples in a sample-agnostic manner, uniformly adding noise across spatial locations before reconstructing the original. Despite promising results, they disregard the fact that foreground locations are inherently more critical for robust reconstruction. Motivated by this, we present a novel reconstruction framework named Attention-Guided Perturbation Network (AGPNet) for industrial anomaly detection. Its core idea is to add perturbations guided by a sample-aware attention mask to improve the learning of invariant normal patterns at important locations. AGPNet consists of two branches, \ie, a reconstruction branch and an auxiliary attention-based perturbation one. The reconstruction branch learns to reconstruct normal samples, while the auxiliary one aims to produce attention masks to guide the noise perturbation process for normal samples. By perturbing more aggressively at those important regions, we encourage the reconstruction branch to learn inherent normal patterns both comprehensively and robustly. Extensive experiments are conducted on several popular benchmarks covering MVTec-AD, VisA, and MVTec-3D, and show that AGPNet consistently obtains leading anomaly detection performance across a variety of setups, including few-shot, one-class, and multi-class ones.