AnomalyMatch: Discovering Rare Objects of Interest with Semi-supervised and Active Learning

Abstract

Anomaly detection in large datasets is essential in fields such as astronomy and computer vision; however, supervised methods typically require extensive anomaly labelling, which is often impractical. We present AnomalyMatch, an anomaly detection framework combining the semi-supervised FixMatch algorithm using EfficientNet classifiers with active learning. By treating anomaly detection as a semi-supervised binary classification problem, we efficiently utilise limited labelled and abundant unlabelled images. We allow iterative model refinement in a user interface for expert verification of high-confidence anomalies and correction of false positives. Built for astronomical data, AnomalyMatch generalises readily to other domains facing similar data challenges. Evaluations on the GalaxyMNIST astronomical dataset and the miniImageNet natural-image benchmark under severe class imbalance (1% anomalies for miniImageNet) display strong performance: starting from five to ten labelled anomalies and after three active learning cycles, we achieve an average AUROC of 0.95 (miniImageNet) and 0.86 (GalaxyMNIST), with respective AUPRC of 0.77 and 0.71. After active learning cycles, anomalies are ranked with 71% (miniImageNet) to 93% precision in the 1% of the highest-ranked images. AnomalyMatch is tailored for large-scale applications, efficiently processing predictions for 100 million images within three days on a single GPU. Integrated into ESAs Datalabs platform, AnomalyMatch facilitates targeted discovery of scientifically valuable anomalies in vast astronomical datasets. Our results underscore the exceptional utility and scalability of this approach for anomaly discovery, highlighting the value of specialised approaches for domains characterised by severe label scarcity.