Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection from Anomalous Training Data via Iterative Latent Token Masking

Anomaly detection and segmentation pose an important task across sectors ranging from medical imaging analysis to industry quality control. However, current unsupervised approaches require training data to not contain any anomalies, a requirement that can be especially challenging in many medical imaging scenarios. In this paper, we propose Iterative Latent Token Masking, a self-supervised framework derived from a robust statistics point of view, translating an iterative model fitting with M-estimators to the task of anomaly detection. In doing so, this allows the training of unsupervised methods on datasets heavily contaminated with anomalous images. Our method stems from prior work on using Transformers, combined with a Vector Quantized-Variational Autoencoder, for anomaly detection, a method with state-of-the-art performance when trained on normal (non-anomalous) data. More importantly, we utilise the token masking capabilities of Transformers to filter out suspected anomalous tokens from each sample's sequence in the training set in an iterative self-supervised process, thus overcoming the difficulties of highly anomalous training data. Our work also highlights shortfalls in current state-of-the-art self-supervised, self-trained and unsupervised models when faced with small proportions of anomalous training data. We evaluate our method on whole-body PET data in addition to showing its wider application in more common computer vision tasks such as the industrial MVTec Dataset. Using varying levels of anomalous training data, our method showcases a superior performance over several state-of-the-art models, drawing attention to the potential of this approach.