Causal-HM: Restoring Physical Generative Logic in Multimodal Anomaly Detection via Hierarchical Modulation

Abstract: Multimodal Unsupervised Anomaly Detection (UAD) is critical for quality assurance in smart manufacturing, particularly in complex processes like robotic welding. However, existing methods often suffer from causal blindness, treating process modalities (e.g., real-time video, audio, and sensors) and result modalities (e.g., post-weld images) as equal feature sources, thereby ignoring the inherent physical generative logic. Furthermore, the heterogeneity gap between high-dimensional visual data and low-dimensional sensor signals frequently leads to critical process context being drowned out. In this paper, we propose Causal-HM, a unified multimodal UAD framework that explicitly models the physical Process to Result dependency. Specifically, our framework incorporates two key innovations: a Sensor-Guided CHM Modulation mechanism that utilizes low-dimensional sensor signals as context to guide high-dimensional audio-visual feature extraction , and a Causal-Hierarchical Architecture that enforces a unidirectional generative mapping to identify anomalies that violate physical consistency. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed Weld-4M benchmark across four modalities demonstrate that Causal-HM achieves a state-of-the-art (SOTA) I-AUROC of 90.7%. Code will be released after the paper is accepted.