Yao Gu

Wenqiao Li, Xiaohao Xu, Yao Gu et al.

Recently, 3D anomaly detection, a crucial problem involving fine-grained geometry discrimination, is getting more attention. However, the lack of abundant real 3D anomaly data limits the scalability of current models. To enable scalable anomaly data collection, we propose a 3D anomaly synthesis pipeline to adapt existing large-scale 3Dmodels for 3D anomaly detection. Specifically, we construct a synthetic dataset, i.e., Anomaly-ShapeNet, basedon ShapeNet. Anomaly-ShapeNet consists of 1600 point cloud samples under 40 categories, which provides a rich and varied collection of data, enabling efficient training and enhancing adaptability to industrial scenarios. Meanwhile,to enable scalable representation learning for 3D anomaly localization, we propose a self-supervised method, i.e., Iterative Mask Reconstruction Network (IMRNet). During training, we propose a geometry-aware sample module to preserve potentially anomalous local regions during point cloud down-sampling. Then, we randomly mask out point patches and sent the visible patches to a transformer for reconstruction-based self-supervision. During testing, the point cloud repeatedly goes through the Mask Reconstruction Network, with each iteration's output becoming the next input. By merging and contrasting the final reconstructed point cloud with the initial input, our method successfully locates anomalies. Experiments show that IMRNet outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving 66.1% in I-AUC on Anomaly-ShapeNet dataset and 72.5% in I-AUC on Real3D-AD dataset. Our dataset will be released at https://github.com/Chopper-233/Anomaly-ShapeNet

Yao Gu, Xiaohao Xu, Yingna Wu

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong general-purpose reasoning but remain limited in physics-grounded anomaly detection, where causal understanding of dynamics is essential. Existing VLMs, trained predominantly on appearance-centric correlations, fail to capture kinematic constraints, leading to poor performance on anomalies such as irregular rotations or violated mechanical motions. We introduce a physics-informed instruction tuning framework that explicitly encodes object properties, motion paradigms, and dynamic constraints into structured prompts. By delivering these physical priors through multi-turn dialogues, our method decomposes causal reasoning into incremental steps, enabling robust internal representations of normal and abnormal dynamics. Evaluated on the Phys-AD benchmark, our approach achieves 96.7% AUROC in video-level detection--substantially outperforming prior SOTA (66.9%)--and yields superior causal explanations (0.777 LLM score). This work highlights how structured physics priors can transform VLMs into reliable detectors of dynamic anomalies.

Wenqiao Li, Yao Gu, Xintao Chen et al.

Humans detect real-world object anomalies by perceiving, interacting, and reasoning based on object-conditioned physical knowledge. The long-term goal of Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) is to enable machines to autonomously replicate this skill. However, current IAD algorithms are largely developed and tested on static, semantically simple datasets, which diverge from real-world scenarios where physical understanding and reasoning are essential. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Physics Anomaly Detection (Phys-AD) dataset, the first large-scale, real-world, physics-grounded video dataset for industrial anomaly detection. Collected using a real robot arm and motor, Phys-AD provides a diverse set of dynamic, semantically rich scenarios. The dataset includes more than 6400 videos across 22 real-world object categories, interacting with robot arms and motors, and exhibits 47 types of anomalies. Anomaly detection in Phys-AD requires visual reasoning, combining both physical knowledge and video content to determine object abnormality. We benchmark state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods under three settings: unsupervised AD, weakly-supervised AD, and video-understanding AD, highlighting their limitations in handling physics-grounded anomalies. Additionally, we introduce the Physics Anomaly Explanation (PAEval) metric, designed to assess the ability of visual-language foundation models to not only detect anomalies but also provide accurate explanations for their underlying physical causes. Our project is available at https://guyao2023.github.io/Phys-AD/.

Yao Gu, Mayank Kejriwal

In social media like Twitter, hashtags carry a lot of semantic information and can be easily distinguished from the main text. Exploring and visualizing the space of hashtags in a meaningful way can offer important insights into a dataset, especially in crisis situations. In this demonstration paper, we present a functioning prototype, HashViz, that ingests a corpus of tweets collected in the aftermath of a crisis situation (such as the Las Vegas shootings) and uses the fastText bag-of-tricks semantic embedding algorithm (from Facebook Research) to embed words and hashtags into a vector space. Hashtag vectors obtained in this way can be visualized using the t-SNE dimensionality reduction algorithm in 2D. Although multiple Twitter visualization platforms exist, HashViz is distinguished by being simple, scalable, interactive and portable enough to be deployed on a server for million-tweet corpora collected in the aftermath of arbitrary disasters, without special-purpose installation, technical expertise, manual supervision or costly software or infrastructure investment. Although simple, we show that HashViz offers an intuitive way to summarize, and gain insight into, a developing crisis situation. HashViz is also completely unsupervised, requiring no manual inputs to go from a raw corpus to a visualization and search interface. Using the recent Las Vegas mass shooting massacre as a case study, we illustrate the potential of HashViz using only a web browser on the client side.

Mayank Kejriwal, Yao Gu

Due to instant availability of data on social media platforms like Twitter, and advances in machine learning and data management technology, real-time crisis informatics has emerged as a prolific research area in the last decade. Although several benchmarks are now available, especially on portals like CrisisLex, an important, practical problem that has not been addressed thus far is the rapid acquisition and benchmarking of data from free, publicly available streams like the Twitter API. In this paper, we present ongoing work on a pipeline for facilitating immediate post-crisis data collection, curation and relevance filtering from the Twitter API. The pipeline is minimally supervised, alleviating the need for feature engineering by including a judicious mix of data preprocessing and fast text embeddings, along with an active learning framework. We illustrate the utility of the pipeline by describing a recent case study wherein it was used to collect and analyze millions of tweets in the immediate aftermath of the Las Vegas shootings.