MetaUAS: Universal Anomaly Segmentation with One-Prompt Meta-Learning
Authors: name: Bin-Bin Gao
Published: 2025-05-14 10:25:26

Abstract: Zero- and few-shot visual anomaly segmentation relies on powerful
vision-language models that detect unseen anomalies using manually designed
textual prompts. However, visual representations are inherently independent of
language. In this paper, we explore the potential of a pure visual foundation
model as an alternative to widely used vision-language models for universal
visual anomaly segmentation. We present a novel paradigm that unifies anomaly
segmentation into change segmentation. This paradigm enables us to leverage
large-scale synthetic image pairs, featuring object-level and local region
changes, derived from existing image datasets, which are independent of target
anomaly datasets. We propose a one-prompt Meta-learning framework for Universal
Anomaly Segmentation (MetaUAS) that is trained on this synthetic dataset and
then generalizes well to segment any novel or unseen visual anomalies in the
real world. To handle geometrical variations between prompt and query images,
we propose a soft feature alignment module that bridges paired-image change
perception and single-image semantic segmentation. This is the first work to
achieve universal anomaly segmentation using a pure vision model without
relying on special anomaly detection datasets and pre-trained visual-language
models. Our method effectively and efficiently segments any anomalies with only
one normal image prompt and enjoys training-free without guidance from
language. Our MetaUAS significantly outperforms previous zero-shot, few-shot,
and even full-shot anomaly segmentation methods. The code and pre-trained
models are available at https://github.com/gaobb/MetaUAS.