Graph-Guided Masked Autoencoder for Process Anomaly Detection

Developing an accurate and reliable anomaly detection model is of great significance for safe operation in the process industry. To minimize false positives, it is crucial to accurately model the intricate topological and nonlinear connections among variables. In this study, a process anomaly detection method based on graph-guided masked autoencoder (GGMAE) is proposed by introducing the concept of the graph to the process industry. GGMAE first constructs a topology graph according to the process flowchart. Then, the patch and mask mechanism forces GGMAE to learn the process intrinsic information to reconstruct the input according to the variable topological relationship and temporal characteristics. Additionally, Kullback-Leibler divergence is used as the loss to ensure that the distribution of input and output is consistent. Experiments on two publicly available anomaly detection benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of GGMAE over existing methods. Visualization of the results demonstrates the physically compliant reconstruction logic.