manufacturing ai developers

Abstract: Synthetic anomaly generation helps expand industrial anomaly datasets when real defects are scarce or unavailable. Existing approaches lie at two extremes: procedural approaches are fast but struggle to represent complex anomalies, while generative approaches produce diverse defects but require costly per-sample generation. We present FLASH, a framework that decouples defect generation from anomaly synthesis under a ``generate once, synthesize many'' paradigm. Given only normal images, FLASH uses Vision-Language Model (VLM) guidance and an image-generation model to produce a small set of defect images, from which it extracts, validates, and banks reusable defect patches. For synthesis of anomalous images, Object Boundary Suppression (OBS) first identifies the probable foreground object-aware region of the host image, while Multi-Resolution Spectral Pyramid (MRSP) noise generates diverse, size-controllable masks that determine the defect location and spatial extent. It then composes a large and diverse synthetic anomalous image set by localizing the defect region, sampling size-controllable placement masks and seamlessly blending retrieved defects onto new defect-free images without further need for image generation. Experiments on the MVTec AD 2 dataset show that FLASH-generated anomalies nearly close the calibration gap on real defects, reaching 78.1% image-level F1 against an 83.6% real-anomaly upper bound and providing the most consistent calibration transfer across detectors among procedural and generative alternatives. Moreover, FLASH synthesizes anomalies more than 11.95x faster than per-sample generative approaches.

Abstract: Industrial anomaly detection (IAD) is evolving beyond conventional detection and localization toward multimodal inspection systems that can describe, explain, and reason about fine-grained defects. Although recent multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based methods improve anomaly understanding through textual reasoning and visual guidance, they face two limitations in fine-grained inspection. First, their visual refinement often requires iteratively revisiting local image regions or augmenting with additional tools. Second, the resulting local defect evidence may not be reliably preserved throughout subsequent reasoning. To address these, we propose Anomaly-LR, a defect-grounded latent reasoning framework that first forms a global understanding of the input and then progressively refines anomaly-relevant representations directly in the visual latent space. We further construct IAD-LR-22K, the first IAD instruction dataset designed for latent reasoning, containing 22,228 image-question instances from 4,523 industrial images, with global textual reasoning traces and region-level visual annotations. Extensive experiments show that Anomaly-LR achieves state-of-the-art performance among comparable-scale methods across multiple IAD benchmarks, without requiring external references or tools. The code and data will be released at https://github.com/Yen666/Anomaly-LR.