Knowledge-Guided Distributional Prompt Learning with Visual Hierarchy for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection

Jiyul Ham, Seongho Yoon, Yonggon Jung, Sangjae Lee, Jun-Geol Baek

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) aims to detect anomalies in previously unseen classes using auxiliary images, with applications such as industrial visual inspection and medical imaging. Recent vision-language-model-based approaches improve ZSAD by aligning textual and visual representations, while distributional prompting further models prompt variability for unseen categories. However, existing methods do not explicitly combine normality-referenced distributional modeling with hierarchy-specific prompt specialization, limiting their ability to model anomalous semantics relative to normality while addressing both image-level detection and fine-grained localization. We propose Hierarchical Knowledge-Guided Distributional Prompt Learning (HiDist), a normality-referenced hierarchical distributional prompt framework for ZSAD. HiDist models each prompt token with a diagonal Gaussian distribution and generates stochastic prompt variations through Monte Carlo sampling. Rather than learning normal and anomalous distributions independently, anomalous prompt distributions are parameterized as deviations from learned normal references, explicitly encoding their dependency. The resulting…