Out of Context: Reliability in Multimodal Anomaly Detection Requires Contextual Inference

arXiv:2604.13252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Anomaly detection aims to identify observations that deviate from expected behavior. Because anomalous events are inherently sparse, most frameworks are trained exclusively on normal data to learn a single reference model of normality. This implicitly assumes that normal behavior can be captured by a single, unconditional reference distribution. In practice, however, anomalies are often context-dependent: A specific observation may be normal unde