HiMatch-AD: DINOv3-driven Hierarchical Matching for Training-free Medical Anomaly Detection

Abstract

Anomaly detection is essential for medical image analysis, where pathological regions often appear as rare deviations from normal anatomical structures. While training-based methods have achieved promising performance, they require task-specific optimization and extensive normal data, which limits scalability across modalities and institutions. Training-free approaches offer greater flexibility by leveraging pretrained visual representations, yet existing methods typically rely on simple nearest-neighbor retrieval and naive aggregation strategies, which may fail to capture hierarchical semantics and ignore the reliability of multiple anomaly responses. In this work, we propose HiMatch-AD, a DINOv3-driven hierarchical matching framework for training-free medical anomaly detection. Our method first retrieves semantically relevant normal references via dual-branch matching that jointly considers global CLS-token similarity and patch-level representations. Hierarchical anomaly maps are then generated across multiple transformer stages by comparing clustered normal features with query representations. To robustly aggregate anomaly responses, we introduce a unified uncertainty-based fusion mechanism that adaptively weights maps according to their reliability. The entire framework operates without any task-specific training. Extensive experiments on the BMAD benchmark, including brain MRI, liver CT, and retinal OCT datasets, demonstrate that HiMatch-AD consistently outperforms both training-based and DINO-based state-of-the-art methods, which highlights the effectiveness of multi-level matching and uncertainty-aware fusion for scalable medical anomaly detection.