ICLAD: In-Context Learning for Unified Tabular Anomaly Detection Across Supervision Regimes

arXiv cs.LG / 3/23/2026

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Key Points

  • ICLAD introduces an in-context learning foundation model for tabular anomaly detection that generalizes across datasets and across the three supervision regimes: one-class, fully unsupervised, and semi-supervised.
  • The model is trained via meta-learning on synthetic tabular anomaly detection tasks and, at inference, assigns anomaly scores by conditioning on the training set without updating model weights.
  • Evaluations on 57 tabular datasets from ADBench show state-of-the-art performance across all supervision regimes, establishing a unified framework for tabular anomaly detection.
  • The work demonstrates how cross-task shared structures can enable flexible deployment across varying supervision levels and data regimes in practical anomaly-detection scenarios.

Abstract

Anomaly detection on tabular data is commonly studied under three supervision regimes, including one-class settings that assume access to anomaly-free training samples, fully unsupervised settings with unlabeled and potentially contaminated training data, and semi-supervised settings with limited anomaly labels. Existing deep learning approaches typically train dataset-specific models under the assumption of a single supervision regime, which limits their ability to leverage shared structures across anomaly detection tasks and to adapt to different supervision levels. We propose ICLAD, an in-context learning foundation model for tabular anomaly detection that generalizes across both datasets and supervision regimes. ICLAD is trained via meta-learning on synthetic tabular anomaly detection tasks, and at inference time, the model assigns anomaly scores by conditioning on the training set without updating model weights. Comprehensive experiments on 57 tabular datasets from ADBench show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across three supervision regimes, establishing a unified framework for tabular anomaly detection.