TR2026-089

Memory-Distilled Selection for Noise-Robust Anomaly Detection


    •  Safarov, S., Park, J., Jung, Y.G., Peng, K.-C., Kim, W., Bang, S., Camps, O., "Memory-Distilled Selection for Noise-Robust Anomaly Detection", International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), July 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-089 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Safarov2026jul,
      • author = {{Safarov, Sirojbek and Park, Jaewoo and Jung, Yoon G. and Peng, Kuan-Chuan and Kim, Wonchul and Bang, Seongdeok and Camps, Octavia}},
      • title = {{Memory-Distilled Selection for Noise-Robust Anomaly Detection}},
      • booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = jul,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-089}
      • }
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  • Research Areas:

    Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning

Abstract:

Anomaly detection (AD) under data contamination is critical for deploying unsupervised defect detection in industrial environments, where cu- rating perfectly clean training sets is impractical. However, existing methods are sensitive to contamination, suffering significant performance degradation as the noise ratio increases. In this paper, we propose Memory-Distilled Selection (MeDS), a training algorithm based on data selection. MeDS constructs an ensemble of partial memories via random subsampling, where the resulting sparsity acts as a low-pass filter that captures nominal patterns across a wide range of noise ratios, enabling coarse-level identification of contaminated samples. The aggregated distances to the bootstrapped memories are then dis- tilled into a reconstruction score network, which is subsequently fine-tuned on clean data filtered using scores from the distilled model, enabling fine-grained localization of anomalies. MeDS is robust across a wide range of noise ratios with- out requiring noise-ratio-specific hyperparameter tuning, achieving 99.16% image-level AUROC on MVTecAD at a 40% noise ratio, and attaining state-of-the-art performance on both VisA and Real-IAD under noisy settings. We thoroughly verify the efficacy of MeDS on industrial AD benchmarks under noisy data scenarios, accompanied by in-depth empirical analyses.