Spatiotemporal Dynamics-Aware Industrial Anomaly Detection and Reasoning

Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) is a long-established problem that aims to detect defects in industrial products during manufacturing for quality control. Most existing studies focus on static visual patterns as the basis for detection. However, in real manufacturing environments, many anomalies are dynamics-based, such as irregular movements that cannot be perceived from static cues alone. We observe that even recent Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approaches fall short in identifying such dynamic anomalies due to limited temporal modeling capability. To address this, we introduce MUSTARD: MUltimodal SpatioTemporal Anomaly Reasoning and Detection, a framework that equips MLLMs with fine-grained spatiotemporal dynamics awareness for detecting and reasoning about dynamics-based defects. MUSTARD introduces optical-flow-guided keyframe selection and augmented modalities to capture critical motion irregularities through local motion patterns and global dynamic evolution. Its normal pattern-based reasoning pipeline requires only a few normal reference samples as the detection basis, avoiding any model updates. This enables efficient adaptation across various products and provides high decision interpretability. MUSTARD is the first MLLM-based framework for dynamics-based IAD. Experiments demonstrate its superior performance in detecting spatiotemporal anomalies and providing plausible explanations. The code will be made publicly available.