SLA$^{{\text{2}}}$2P: Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection With Adversarial Perturbation

Anomaly detection is a foundational yet difficult problem in machine learning. In this work, we propose a new and effective framework, dubbed as SLA ² P, for unsupervised anomaly detection. Following the extraction of delegate embeddings from raw data, we implement random projections on the features and consider features transformed by disparate projections as being associated with separate pseudo-classes. We then train a neural network for classification on these transformed features to conduct self-supervised learning. Subsequently, we introduce adversarial disturbances to the modified attributes, and we develop anomaly scores built on the classifier's predictive uncertainties concerning these disrupted features. Our approach is motivated by the fact that as anomalies are relatively rare and decentralized, 1) the training of the pseudo-label classifier concentrates more on acquiring the semantic knowledge of regular data instead of anomalous data; 2) the altered attributes of the normal data exhibit greater resilience to disturbances compared to those of the anomalous data. Therefore, the disrupted modified attributes of anomalies can not be well classified and correspondingly tend to attain lesser anomaly scores. The results of experiments on various benchmark datasets for images, text, and inherently tabular data demonstrate that SLA ² P achieves state-of-the-art performance consistently.