SOWA: Adapting Hierarchical Frozen Window Self-Attention to Visual-Language Models for Better Anomaly Detection

Abstract: Visual anomaly detection is essential in industrial manufacturing, yet traditional methods often rely heavily on extensive normal datasets and task-specific models, limiting their scalability. Recent advancements in large-scale vision-LLMs have significantly enhanced zero- and few-shot anomaly detection. However, these approaches may not fully leverage hierarchical features, potentially overlooking nuanced details crucial for accurate detection. To address this, we introduce a novel window self-attention mechanism based on the CLIP model, augmented with learnable prompts to process multi-level features within a Soldier-Officer Window Self-Attention (SOWA) framework. Our method has been rigorously evaluated on five benchmark datasets, achieving superior performance by leading in 18 out of 20 metrics, setting a new standard against existing state-of-the-art techniques.