ADSeeker: A Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning Framework for Industry Anomaly Detection and Reasoning

Automatic vision inspection holds significant importance in industry inspection. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit strong language understanding capabilities and hold promise for this task, their performance remains significantly inferior to that of human experts. In this context, we identify two key challenges: (i) insufficient integration of anomaly detection (AD) knowledge during pre-training and (ii) the lack of technically precise and context-aware language generation for anomaly reasoning. To address these issues, we propose ADSeeker, an anomaly task assistant designed to enhance inspection performance through knowledge-grounded reasoning. ADSeeker first leverages a curated visual document knowledge base, SEEK-MVTec&VisA (SEEK-M&V), which we construct to address the limitations of existing resources that rely solely on unstructured text. SEEK-M&V includes semantic-rich descriptions and image-document pairs, enabling more comprehensive anomaly understanding. To effectively retrieve and utilize this knowledge, we introduce the Query Image-Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Q2K RAG) framework. To further enhance the performance in zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD), ADSeeker leverages the Hierarchical Sparse Prompt mechanism and type-level features to efficiently extract anomaly patterns. Furthermore, to tackle the challenge of limited industry anomaly detection (IAD) data, we introduce the largest-scale AD dataset, Multi-type Anomaly (MulA), encompassing 72 multi-scale defect types across 26 categories. Extensive experiments show that our plug-and-play framework, ADSeeker, achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on several benchmark datasets.