FreqAnchorAD: Language-Free Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection via Frequency-Deviation Anchoring
Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) aims to detect anomalies and localize defective regions in unseen target domains without target training data. Recent ZSAD methods build on pretrained vision models, particularly CLIP, and construct normal and anomaly references from textual prompts or learnable visual representations. These methods perform anomaly discrimination primarily in spatial feature spaces, where subtle changes in texture, boundaries, and local structures can be confused with normal appearance variations. Although inconspicuous spatially, such defects can disrupt local texture regularity or boundary continuity, inducing response deviations across frequency bands. However, existing ZSAD methods do not explicitly model these frequency-dependent characteristics. Our image-domain analysis reveals that local defects exhibit spatial-frequency deviations from normal references across low-, middle-, and high-frequency bands, indicating that anomaly evidence is not universally dominated by high-frequency responses. Motivated by this observation, we propose FreqAnchorAD, a frequency-aware framework that organizes frequency-enhanced responses for anchor-relative anomaly discrimination. Specifically, the Local Frequency Compensation Module (LFCM) enhances intermediate patch tokens with local spatial-frequency cues. The Frequency-Deviation Anchor Projector (FDAP), our core discrimination module, organizes enhanced responses along a source-derived channel coordinate and measures anomaly evidence through relative similarity to normal and anomaly anchors. Finally, Asymmetric Anchor Supervision (AAS) stabilizes normal-anchor alignment while preserving diverse anomaly patterns. Experiments on thirteen industrial and medical benchmarks show that FreqAnchorAD achieves state-of-the-art mean performance in image-level anomaly recognition and pixel-level defect localization.