Rethinking Auxiliary Modalities in Multimodal Zero-shot Anomaly Detection: From Semantic Fusion to Conditional Modulation

Abstract

Recent foundation model-based methods have endowed RGB images with strong zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) through vision-language pretraining. However, RGB observations alone remain limited in perceiving anomalies dominated by geometric deformation, depth variation, or subtle surface changes. Auxiliary modalities can provide complementary structural information, but existing multimodal methods typically fuse them directly into a shared semantic space, which may disturb the text-aligned anomaly semantics established by RGB foundation models and often requires modality-specific architectures. To address this issue, we propose a plug-and-play auxiliary-conditioned enhancement framework for zero-shot anomaly detection. Instead of reconstructing a joint multimodal anomaly semantic space, our framework preserves the original RGB image-text anomaly matching pathway and uses auxiliary observations as conditional signals for RGB feature refinement, allowing auxiliary modalities to seamlessly enhance existing RGB-based zero-shot anomaly detectors. Specifically, a lightweight meta-learning module takes global RGB and auxiliary representations as input and generates sample-adaptive low-rank residual updates to determine how RGB features should be refined. We further construct uncertainty-aware spatial modulation from the initial RGB anomaly response and auxiliary reliability, which determines where local residual updates are strengthened or suppressed. This global-to-local conditional modulation enables selective multimodal enhancement while preserving the original RGB anomaly semantics. Extensive experiments on MVTec 3D-AD and Eyecandies demonstrate that our framework consistently improves multiple popular RGB-based zero-shot anomaly detectors, achieving state-of-the-art performance for multimodal zero-shot anomaly detection.