Anomaly detection (AD) is crucial in various domains like cybersecurity, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing by identifying unexpected patterns in real-world data.
Diffusion models (DMs) in deep learning have gained interest for their ability to learn complex data distributions and generate high-fidelity samples, serving as a robust framework for unsupervised AD.
A survey on anomaly detection and generation with diffusion models (ADGDM) analyzes theoretical foundations and practical implementations across different data types.
Unlike previous surveys that treat AD and generation as separate, this survey emphasizes their synergistic relationship, showcasing how generation and detection methods can enhance each other.
The survey categorizes ADGDM methods based on anomaly scoring mechanisms, conditioning strategies, and architectural designs, discussing their strengths and limitations.
Key challenges like scalability and computational efficiency are highlighted along with future directions such as efficient architectures and integration with foundation models.
The survey aims to assist researchers and practitioners in utilizing DMs for innovative AD solutions by synthesizing recent advances and identifying open research questions.