Contrast Memory for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Jiahao Li, Yiqiang Chen, Yunbing Xing, Yang Gu, Xiangyuan Lan

Abstract: Real-world multivariate time series unsupervised anomaly detection is a challenging problem due to intricate temporal correlations. Recently, impressive progress have been made in tackling this issue through the design of large-scale models, facilitated by the growing model parameters. However, in resource-constrained scenarios such as ubiquitous computing and edge computing, the large-scale models suffer from issues like high parameter complexity and expensive training overheads. Existing methods can only strive for a direct tradeoff between model size and performance. To address this challenge, we propose DiMER (Diminutive Memory-Enhanced Reconstruction), a model with parameters of the order of 0.1M. In DiMER, we introduce a novel contrast memory mechanism to learn normal patterns with diminutive network and propose a temporal reconstruction loss nto add the autocorrelation information. In addition, we introduce a multi-space composite detection criterion, an anomaly score calculation that takes into account both memory space and data space. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets across various domains demonstrate that the proposed model achieves comparable or even superior performance to large-scale models while maintaining lightweight.