TIRAD: Text-guided Image Residual Learning for Generalist Anomaly Detection

Abstract

Recent anomaly detection studies have shown that residual features, which model the discrepancy between normal and abnormal patterns, provide strong generalization to anomalies unseen during training. However, existing residual-based approaches mainly rely on visual discrepancies derived from image representations, while semantic discrepancies that can be explicitly expressed through language remain largely underexplored. To address this problem, we propose TIRAD, Text-guided Image Residual Learning for Generalist Anomaly Detection, a multimodal residual learning framework that defines the discrepancy between textual representations of normal and abnormal states as a Text Residual Feature and uses it to guide the Image Residual Feature. Specifically, a Text Fusion Module converts patch-level text residuals into a gate that modulates the image residual of each patch. The gate retains the visual discrepancies that the text residual identifies as defect-related and attenuates the others, leading to more discriminative anomaly representations. Extensive experiments on industrial benchmarks and industrial-to-medical transfer demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing image-centric residual learning methods.