Memory Mechanism for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Jiahao Li, Yiqiang Chen, Yunbing Xing

Keywords: Unsupervised learning, Anomaly detection

TL;DR: This paper proposed a memory mechanism to enable the model learning to know unknowns.

Abstract: Unsupervised anomaly detection is a binary classification that detects anomalies in unseen samples given only unlabeled normal data. Reconstruction-based approaches are widely used, which perform reconstruction error minimization on training data to learn normal patterns and quantify the degree of anomalies by reconstruction errors on testing data. However, this approach tends to miss anomalies when the normal data has multi-pattern. Because the model generalizes unrestrictedly beyond normal patterns even to include anomaly patterns. In this paper, we proposed a memory mechanism that memorizes typical normal patterns through a capacity-controlled external differentiable matrix so that the generalization of the model to anomalies is limited by the retrieval of the matrix. We achieved state-of-the-art performance on several public benchmarks.