Masked Diffusion Modeling for Anomaly Detection 文章

arXiv:2605.30046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Anomaly detection aims to identify samples that deviate from the nominal data distribution and is central to many safety-critical applications. However, developing effective anomaly detection methods for categorical, mixed-type, and discrete sequence data remains challenging and relatively underexplored. Masked diffusion models provide a natural way to model such data by learning to recover masked values from the remaining visible context. In this paper, we propose Masked Diffusion for Anomaly Detection (MaskDiff-AD), a forward-only method based on masked diffusion models trained only on nominal data. Given a test sample, MaskDiff-AD constructs anomaly scores from the difficulty of reconstructing randomly masked coordinates, yielding a content-sensitive score that operates directly on discrete state spaces while avoiding reverse-time sampling.