Yunkang Cao (曹云康)

I am currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Robotics, Hunan University. I received my Ph.D. from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), where I had the privilege of being mentored by Prof. Weiming Shen (FCAE, FIEEE). During my doctoral studies, I completed a one-year research visit to Politecnico di Milano (Polimi) under the supervision of Prof. Giacomo Boracchi.

My research centers on Deep Learning and Computer Vision, with specialized expertise in Anomaly Detection & Reasoning for Embodied Intelligence. I particularly focus on developing intelligent solutions for manufacturing applications. The long-term vision driving my work is to advance robotic systems through enhanced safety and interpretability, equipping intelligent visual systems with robust reasoning and planning capabilities to diagnose and recover from open-world anomalies.

本课题组目前正在招收硕士研究生、研究助理和访问学生，同时欢迎有志向的本科生提前参与科研工作。 本课题组注重平等交流，沟通融洽，与华中科技大学机械学院、湖南大学机器人学院、福耀科技大学的其他导师团队、以及腾讯优图、宁德时代算法团队具有紧密合作，能够提供共同学习讨论，科研交流，和企业合作的机会。

如您对以下研究方向感兴趣，欢迎邮件联系探讨合作可能：

• 工业视觉异常检测
• 具身智能决策系统
• 开放环境下的机器人感知

📩 电子邮箱: caoyunkang0207@gmail.com

🏆 Personal Highlights

• Academic Impact: 10 first-authored papers accepted (including venues like ECCV, CVPR), over 600 citations, and runner-up in a CVPR competition

• Open-Source Contributions: 1600+ GitHub stars, led four projects that have garnered over 100 stars each, with one repository achieving nearly 800 stars

• Engineering Projects: Led university-industry collaboration projects with companies like CATL and Tesla suppliers, solving real-world product quality inspection challenges and contributing to over 20 patents

• Technical Expertise: Proficient in adapting models such as CLIP/LLM/Stable Diffusion, multimodal anomaly detection, and full-stack development for industrial quality inspection systems

🔥 News

• 2025.05:  🎉🎉 We are deeply honored to have been awarded the Best Student Paper Award at CSCWD2025 for our paper MLLM-based Anomaly Detection.
• 2025.04:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed Zero-shot Image Anomaly Detection has been accepted by IJCAI.
• 2025.04: 🎉🎉 We successfully organized the CVPR2025 Pre-conference “Industrial Vision” Special Session), which attracted over 5,000 online viewers!
• 2025.03:  🎉🎉 Two papers addressed Unified Anomaly Detection and Unseen Anomaly Generation and has been accepted by CVPR.
• 2025.02:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed MLLM-based Anomaly Detection has been accepted by CSCWD.
• 2025.02:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed Point Cloud Anomaly Detection has been accepted by IEEE TASE.
• 2025.01:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed Zero-shot Image Anomaly Detection has been accepted by IEEE TCYB.
• 2024.12:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed High-Resolution Image Anomaly Detection has been accepted by IEEE TII.
• 2024.11:  🎉🎉 I won the National Scholarship for Ph.D., thank you all!
• 2024.09:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed Few-shot Anomaly Detection is accepted by IEEE TNNLS.
• 2024.09:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed Logical Anomaly Detection is accepted by IEEE TASE.
• 2024.08:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed Knowledge Distillation is accepted by Knowledge-based Systems.
• 2024.08:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed Few-shot Image Anomaly Detection is accepted by Knowledge-based Systems.
• 2024.07:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed Zero-shot Image Anomaly Detection is accepted by ECCV.
• 2024.06:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed Point Cloud Anomaly Detection is accepted by Pattern Recognition.
• 2024.05:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed Multi-class Image Anomaly Detection is accepted by IEEE TII.
• 2024.05:  🎉🎉 Our papers addressed Robust Image Anomaly Detection and Multi-Illumination Image Anomaly Detection are accepted by IEEE CASE.
• 2024.02:  🎉🎉 We are organizing a special session titled Industrial Foundation Models and Applications in Smart Manufacturing (CODE: ypg7k) in CASE 2024. We welcome contributions!
• 2023.12:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed Semi-supervised Image Anomaly Detection is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement.
• 2023.12:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed Semi-supervised Image Anomaly Detection is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems.
• 2023.11:  🎉🎉 We released Towards Generic Anomaly Detection and Understanding: Large-scale Visual-linguistic Model (GPT-4V) Takes the Lead (Code), the first comprehensive evaluation on GPT-4V for generic anomaly detection. Press Coverage: 机器之心.
• 2023.09:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed Unsupervised Image Anomaly Detection is accepted by Knowledge-based Systems.
• 2023.06:  🎉🎉 We won the 2nd place in CVPR VAND Zero-shot Anomaly Detection Challenge. Press Coverage: 华中科技大学, 我爱计算机视觉.
• 2023.05:  🎉🎉 We released Segment Any Anomaly without Training via Hybrid Prompt Regularization (Paper) (Code) for zero-shot anomaly segmentation.
• 2023.05:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed High-Resolution Image Anomaly Detection has been accepted by IEEE CASE 2023.
• 2023.03:  🎉🎉 We released Complementary Pseudo Multimodal Feature for Point Cloud Anomaly Detection for point cloud anomaly detection.
• 2023.01:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed Unsupervised Image Anomaly Detection is accepted by IEEE TII.
• 2022.09:  🎉🎉 One paper is accepted by Knowledge-based Systems.
• 2022.05:  🎉🎉 One paper is accepted by IEEE CASE 2022.
• 2022.05:  🎉🎉 We get The Mathematical Modeling Stars Nomination in the 18th China Post-graduate Mathematical Contest.
• 2022.03:  🎉🎉 Two papers are accepted by IEEE CSCWD 2022.
• 2022.03:  🎉🎉 Our paper addressed Unsupervised Image Anomaly Detection is accepted by Knowledge-based Systems.

📝 Publications

Peer-Reviewed Publications 
Manuscripts under Review 

# co-first author | * corresponding author

Peer-Reviewed Publications

1. Exploring Intrinsic Normal Prototypes within a Single Image for Universal Anomaly Detection [Paper] [Code]
   Wei Luo#, Yunkang Cao#, Haiming Yao#, Xiaotian Zhang, Jianan Lou, Yuqi Cheng, Weiming Shen, Wenyong Yu*
   IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). 2025.
2. Anomaly Anything: Promptable Unseen Visual Anomaly Generation [Paper] [Code]
   Han Sun, Yunkang Cao, Hao Dong, Olga Fink*
   IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). 2025.
3. Customizing Visual-Language Foundation Models for Multi-Modal Anomaly Detection and Reasoning [Paper] [Code]
   Xiahao Xu#, Yunkang Cao#, Huaxin Zhang, Nong Sang, Xiaonan Huang, Weiming Shen*
   IEEE International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD). 2025. Best Student Paper Award
4. Personalizing Vision-Language Models with Hybrid Prompts for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection [Paper] [Code]
   Yunkang Cao, Xiaohao Xu, Yuqi Cheng, Chen Sun, Zongwei Du, Liang Gao, Weiming Shen*
   IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics (IEEE TCYB). 2025.
5. VarAD: Lightweight High-Resolution Image Anomaly Detection via Visual Autoregressive Modeling
   Yunkang Cao, Haiming Yao, Wei Luo, Weiming Shen*
   IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (IEEE TII). 2025.
6. AdaCLIP: Adapting CLIP with Hybrid Learnable Prompts for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection [Paper] [Code]
   Yunkang Cao, Jiangning Zhang, Luca Frittoli, Yuqi Cheng, Weiming Shen*, Giacomo Boracchi
   European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV). 2024.
7. Complementary pseudo multimodal feature for point cloud anomaly detection [Paper] [Code]
   Yunkang Cao, Xiaohao Xu, Weiming Shen*
   Pattern Recognition (PR). 2024.
8. BiaS: Incorporating Biased Knowledge to Boost Unsupervised Image Anomaly Localization [Paper]
   Yunkang Cao, Xiaohao Xu, Chen Sun, Liang Gao, Weiming Shen*
   IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems (IEEE TSMC). 2024.
9. Collaborative discrepancy optimization for reliable image anomaly localization [Paper] [Code]
   Yunkang Cao, Xiaohao Xu, Zhaoge Liu, Weiming Shen*
   IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (IEEE TII). 2023.
10. High-Resolution Image Anomaly Detection via Spatiotemporal Consistency Incorporated Knowledge Distillation [Paper]
    Yunkang Cao, Yiheng Zhang, Weiming Shen*
    IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (IEEE CASE). 2023.
11. Informative knowledge distillation for image anomaly segmentation [Paper] [Code]
    Yunkang Cao, Qian Wan, Weiming Shen*, Liang Gao
    Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS). 2022.
12. Boosting Global-Local Feature Matching via Anomaly Synthesis for Multi-Class Point Cloud Anomaly Detection
    Yuqi Cheng, Yunkang Cao, Dongfang Wang, Weiming Shen*, Wenlong Li
    IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (IEEE TASE). 2025.
13. Prototypical Learning Guided Context-Aware Segmentation Network for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection [Paper] [Code]
    Yuxin Jiang, Yunkang Cao, Weiming Shen*
    IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (IEEE TNNLS). 2024.
14. LogiCode: an LLM-Driven Framework for Logical Anomaly Detection [Paper] [Code]
    Yiheng Zhang, Yunkang Cao, Xiaohao Xu, Weiming Shen*
    IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (IEEE TASE). 2024.
15. Prior Normality Prompt Transformer for Multi-class Industrial Image Anomaly Detection [Paper]
    Haiming Yao, Yunkang Cao, Wei Luo, Weihang Zhang, Wenyong Yu*, Weiming Shen
    IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (IEEE TII). 2024.
16. Deep Feature Contrasting for Industrial Image Anomaly Segmentatio [Paper]
    Qian Wan, Yunkang Cao, Liang Gao, Xinyu Li*, Yiping Gao
    IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement (IEEE TIM). 2024.
17. Dual-path Frequency Discriminators for Few-shot Anomaly Detection
    Yuhu Bai#, Jiangning Zhang#, Zhaofeng Chen, Yuhang Dong, Yunkang Cao, Guanzhong Tian*
    Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS). 2024.
18. Generative Denoise Distillation: Simple Stochastic Noises Induce Efficient Knowledge Transfer for Dense Prediction
    Zhaoge Liu, Xiaohao Xu, Yunkang Cao, Weiming Shen*
    Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS). 2024.
19. RAD: A Comprehensive Dataset for Benchmarking the Robustness of Image Anomaly Detection [Paper] [Code]
    Yuqi Cheng, Yunkang Cao, Rui Chen, Weiming Shen*
    IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (IEEE CASE). 2024.
20. Attention Fusion Reverse Distillation for Multi-Lighting Image Anomaly Detection [Paper]
    Yiheng Zhang, Yunkang Cao, Tianhang Zhang, Weiming Shen*
    IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (IEEE CASE). 2024.
21. A masked reverse knowledge distillation method incorporating global and local information for image anomaly detection [Paper] [Code]
    Yuxin Jiang, Yunkang Cao, Weiming Shen*
    Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS). 2023.
22. Position encoding enhanced feature mapping for image anomaly detection [Paper] [Code]
    Qian Wan, Yunkang Cao, Liang Gao, Weiming Shen, Xinyu Li*
    IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (IEEE CASE). 2022.

Manuscripts under Review

1. A Generalized Medical Anomaly Detection Suite: Detecting Anomalies in Multi-Source and Multi-Modality Images.
   Yunkang Cao#, Haiming Yao#, Yu Cai, Hao Chen, Weiming Shen*
   IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (IEEE TNNLS). (under review)
2. A Survey on Visual Anomaly Detection: Challenge, Approach, and Prospect [Paper]
   Yunkang Cao, Xiaohao Xu, Jiangning Zhang, Yuqi Cheng, Xiaonan Huang, Guansong Pang, Weiming Shen* (under review)
   
3. Towards Zero-shot Point Cloud Anomaly Detection: A Multi-View Projection Framework [Paper] [Code]
   Yuqi Cheng#, Yunkang Cao#, Guoyang Xie, Zhichao Lu, Weiming Shen*
   IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems (IEEE TSMC) . (major revision)
4. VTFusion: A Vision-Text Multimodal Fusion Network for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection
   Yuxin Jiang, Yunkang Cao, Yuqi Cheng, Yiheng Zhang, Weiming Shen*
   IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics (IEEE TCYB). (major revision)
5. Global-Regularized Neighborhood Regression for Efficient Zero-Shot Texture Anomaly Detection [Paper] [Code]
   Haiming Yao, Wei Luo, Yunkang Cao, Yiheng Zhang, Wenyong Yu*, Weiming Shen
   IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems (IEEE TSMC). (major revision)
6. URA-Net: Uncertainty-Integrated Anomaly Perception and Restoration Attention Network for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection
   Wei Luo, Peng Xing, Yunkang Cao, Haiming Yao, Weiming Shen, Zechao Li* (under review)
   

💻 Projects

• constructed a high-resolution defect inspection prototype for mobile e-ink screens.
• collected a comprehensive dataset of high-resolution images for mobile e-ink screen inspection.
• translated image anomaly detection into token prediction, and introduced state space models to predict the future tokens based on previous tokens.
• achieved high detection efficiency with great global information capture capacity for high-resolution images.

• constructed a multi-view and multi-illumination defect inspection prototype equipment for curved surface parts.
• collected an automotive part inspection dataset featuring multi-illumination images.
• proposed a multi-illumination visual anomaly detection task and extended reverse knowledge distillation for this task.
• improved 6.5% detection AUROC with minimal additional overhead in comparison to anomaly detection under single illumination.

🥇 Selected Awards

• National Scholarship (the highest scholarship for Ph.D.), 2024.11
• Provincial Second Prize, China International College Students’ Innovation Competition, 2024.08
• 2nd place in CVPR VAND Zero-shot Anomaly Detection Challenge
• First-class Scholarship for Postgraduates, HUST, 2020.09, 2021.09, 2022.09
• Student Award for Research and Innovation, HUST, 2022.05
• Mathematical Modeling Stars Nomination (TOP 2) in the 18th China Post-graduate Mathematical Contest, 2022.05
• Merit Postgraduate student, HUST, 2021.09
• Excellent Graduates, HUST, 2019.06
• National Scholarship (the highest scholarship for B.E), 2017.09, 2019.09
• Second Class Prize, Undergraduate Electronics Design Contest, Provincial, 2018.09
• Third Class Prize, Undergraduate Intelligent Robotics Contest, National, 2018.05

🎓📚 Academic Service

• Journal Reviewer, IEEE TSMC, IEEE TNNLS, IEEE TII, IEEE TKDE, IEEE TCSVT, IEEE TASE, PR, etc.
• Conference Reviewer, CVPR2024/2025, NeurIPS2024/2025, ICML2025, AAAI2023/2024/2025, ECCV2024, ICLR2025, ICRA2024, IROS2024/2025, etc.
• Co-organizer of special sessions, [Anomaly Detection with Foundation Models (ADFM)] at IJCAI (2024).
• Co-organizer of special sessions, [Industrial Foundation Models and Applications in Smart Manufacturing] at the IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (2024).

💬 Invited Talks

• 2024.07, EPFL, “Application-Oriented Industrial Visual Anomaly Detection” [Slides].
• 2023.11, National University of Defense Technology, “Overview of Image Anomaly Detection—Review, Applications, and Future Prospects” [Slides].

📖 Educations

• 2023.10 - 2024.10, Politecnico di Milano

  Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering
  Visiting Ph.D. in Computer Science                                      Advisor: Giacomo Boracchi

• 2020.09 - 2025.06, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

  State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology
  Ph.D. Candidate in Mechanical Engineering                                      Advisor: Weiming Shen

• 2016.09 - 2020.06, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

  B.S. in Mechanical Design, Manufacture & Automation    

📋 Work Experience

• 2025.06 - Present, Hunan University

  Assistant Professor, School of Robotics