Bidirectional adaptive transformers for multimodal anomaly detection

The effective integration of features derived from RGB images and 3D point clouds presents a substantial challenge in the field of multimodal anomaly detection (MAD). Existing MAD methods typically rely on static fusion paradigms built upon frozen pre-trained encoders. While these frameworks facilitate spatial alignment, they lack the mechanism to establish latent semantic correspondence, thereby inducing cross-modal interference that degrades anomaly discriminability. To mitigate these limitations, this study proposes a Bidirectional Adaptive Transformers (BAT) framework, which constructs comprehensive and semantically aligned multimodal representations by leveraging complementary attributes across modalities. The BAT framework introduces a Bidirectional Feature Alignment (BFA) module, which employs a mutual predictive mechanism to bridge the gap between 2D textural patterns and 3D geometric structures. This bidirectional interaction explicitly enhances the textural granularity of point cloud descriptors while augmenting the spatial contextual awareness of RGB features. To ensure that the latent representations possess sufficient informational density for alignment, BAT incorporates a parameter-efficient adaptation architecture. By utilizing lightweight image and point cloud adapters, the framework facilitates specialized fine-tuning of pre-trained models, mitigating the information loss inherent in frozen encoders. Extensive experiments conducted on MVTec 3D-AD and Eyecandies confirm that BAT achieves state-of-the-art anomaly detection performance, significantly outperforming existing MAD methods.