Graph-Attention-Regularized Deep Support Vector Data Description for Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection: A Case Study in Automotive Quality Control

Abstract

This paper addresses semi-supervised anomaly detection in settings where only a small subset of normal data can be labeled. Such conditions arise, for example, in industrial quality control of windshield wiper noise, where expert labeling is costly and limited. Our objective is to learn a one-class decision boundary that leverages the geometry of unlabeled data while remaining robust to contamination and scarcity of labeled normals. We propose a graph-attention-regularized deep support vector data description (GAR-DSVDD) model that combines a deep one-class enclosure with a latent k-nearest-neighbor graph whose edges are weighted by similarity- and score-aware attention. The resulting loss integrates (i) a distance-based enclosure on labeled normals, (ii) a graph smoothness term on squared distances over the attention-weighted graph, and (iii) a center-pull regularizer on unlabeled samples to avoid over-smoothing and boundary drift. Experiments on a controlled simulated dataset and an industrial windshield wiper acoustics dataset show that GAR-DSVDD consistently improves the F1 score under scarce label conditions. On average, F1 increases from 0.78 to 0.84 on the simulated benchmark and from 0.63 to 0.86 on the industrial case study relative to the best competing baseline.