Enhancing Anomaly Detection via Generating Diversified and Hard-to-distinguish Synthetic Anomalies

Abstract

Unsupervised anomaly detection is a daunting task, as it relies solely on normality patterns from the training data to identify unseen anomalies during testing. Recent approaches have focused on leveraging domain-specific transformations or perturbations to generate synthetic anomalies from normal samples. The objective here is to acquire insights into normality patterns by learning to differentiate between normal samples and these crafted anomalies. However, these approaches often encounter limitations when domain-specific transformations are not well-specified such as in tabular data, or when it becomes trivial to distinguish between them. To address these issues, we introduce a novel domain-agnostic method that employs a set of conditional perturbators and a discriminator. The perturbators are trained to generate input-dependent perturbations, which are subsequently utilized to construct synthetic anomalies, and the discriminator is trained to distinguish normal samples from them. We ensure that the generated anomalies are both diverse and hard to distinguish through two key strategies: i) directing perturbations to be orthogonal to each other and ii) constraining perturbations to remain in proximity to normal samples. Throughout experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art benchmarks, which is evident not only in image data but also in tabular data, where domain-specific transformation is not readily accessible. Additionally, we empirically confirm the adaptability of our method to semi-supervised settings, demonstrating its capacity to incorporate supervised signals to enhance anomaly detection performance even further.