TR2026-010

Local Density-Based Anomaly Score Normalization for Domain Generalization


    •  Wilkinghoff, K., Yang, H., Ebbers, J., Germain, F.G., Wichern, G., Le Roux, J., "Local Density-Based Anomaly Score Normalization for Domain Generalization", IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, January 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-010 PDF Software
      • @article{Wilkinghoff2026jan,
      • author = {Wilkinghoff, Kevin and Yang, Haici and Ebbers, Janek and Germain, François G and Wichern, Gordon and {Le Roux}, Jonathan},
      • title = {{Local Density-Based Anomaly Score Normalization for Domain Generalization}},
      • journal = {IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = jan,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-010}
      • }
  • MERL Contacts:
  • Research Areas:

    Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio

Abstract:

State-of-the-art anomalous sound detection (ASD) systems in domain-shifted conditions rely on projecting audio signals into an embedding space and using distance-based outlier detection to compute anomaly scores. One of the major difficulties to overcome is the so-called domain mismatch between the anomaly score distributions of a source domain and a target domain that differ acoustically and in terms of the amount of training data provided. A decision threshold that is optimal for one domain may be highly sub-optimal for the other domain and vice versa. This significantly degrades the performance when only using a single decision threshold, as is required when generalizing to multiple data domains that are possibly unseen during training while still using the same trained ASD system as in the source domain. To reduce this mismatch between the domains, we pro- pose a simple local-density-based anomaly score normalization scheme. In experiments conducted on several ASD datasets, we show that the proposed normalization scheme consistently improves performance for various types of embedding-based ASD systems and yields better results than existing anomaly score normalization approaches.

 

  • Software & Data Downloads

  • Related Publications

  •  Wilkinghoff, K., Yang, H., Ebbers, J., Germain, F.G., Wichern, G., Le Roux, J., "Local Density-Based Anomaly Score Normalization for Domain Generalization", arXiv, September 2025.
    BibTeX arXiv
    • @article{Wilkinghoff2025sep,
    • author = {Wilkinghoff, Kevin and Yang, Haici and Ebbers, Janek and Germain, François G and Wichern, Gordon and {Le Roux}, Jonathan},
    • title = {{Local Density-Based Anomaly Score Normalization for Domain Generalization}},
    • journal = {arXiv},
    • year = 2025,
    • month = sep,
    • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10951}
    • }
  •  Wilkinghoff, K., Yang, H., Ebbers, J., Germain, F.G., Wichern, G., Le Roux, J., "Keeping the Balance: Anomaly Score Calculation for Domain Generalization", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), DOI: 10.1109/​ICASSP49660.2025.10888402, April 2025.
    BibTeX TR2025-030 PDF Software
    • @inproceedings{Wilkinghoff2025mar,
    • author = {{{Wilkinghoff, Kevin and Yang, Haici and Ebbers, Janek and Germain, François G and Wichern, Gordon and Le Roux, Jonathan}}},
    • title = {{{Keeping the Balance: Anomaly Score Calculation for Domain Generalization}}},
    • booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
    • year = 2025,
    • month = apr,
    • doi = {10.1109/ICASSP49660.2025.10888402},
    • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-030}
    • }