Papers for

retail supply chain managers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Application driven benchmark reveals challenges in manufacturing and retail defect detection

Detecting Defects that Matter: An Application-Driven Benchmark for Anomaly Detection in Manufacturing and Retail Logistics (VAND 4.0 Challenge)

Abstract: Existing Anomaly Detection benchmarks are saturated and often unrealistic. As part of the VAND 4.0 Challenge, we introduce a hidden-test, application-driven benchmark across two deployment-critical domains: industrial manufacturing and retail logistics. In the Industrial Track (MVTec AD 2), the results reveal that unsupervised anomaly segmentation remains challenging: the best regular-setting method achieves only ~57\% pixel-level $SegF_1$, indicating substantial room for improvement. Zero-shot approaches trail by ~15 $SegF_1$ points, confirming that task-specific training on normal data remains essential for precise defect localization. Robustness to distribution shifts remains a key open challenge and DINOv3-backbones clearly dominate this track. In the Retail Track (Kaputt 2), the results reveal that (1) supervised defect detection is approaching saturation for common defect types; (2) the best off-the-shelf VLM approach trails specialized models by ~28 AP, confirming that currently VLMs cannot replace fine-tuned detectors, (3) reference images did not prove helpful for top-performing approaches. Performance collapses on rare defects (spillage ~53 AP, missing units ~27 AP), where the supervised ceiling is bounded by data availability. To drive future progress in this domain, we provide a new low-prevalence retail AD dataset (Kaputt-Rare). Across both tracks, computational efficiency is assessed as a first-class metric combining performance, throughput, memory, and power consumption. We introduce a novel metric for measuring efficiency and reveal that that top-performing methods rely on heavy architectures while efficiency is largely neglected. Overall, we conclude that the community needs (a) more efficiency-aware method development, and (b) true anomaly detection approaches for rare defects and shifting conditions. https://sites.google.com/view/vand4-cvpr2026/challenge

Sat 3 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Finding defects in products is important but current tests for computer methods are often unrealistic or too easy. The authors introduce a new realistic test that looks at detecting problems in factories and retail logistics. They show that unsupervised methods for finding defects in manufacturing still struggle, while trained methods work better but need specific training. In retail, common defects are detected well, but rare defects and changing conditions remain difficult. They also highlight that the best methods use heavy computing and suggest the need for more efficient and adaptable approaches.
Open → 2610.04392v1