Don't Just Impute, Detect: Task-Aware Diffusion Pipelines for Edge Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2610.40732v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) edge pipelines routinely lose contiguous blocks of multi-sensor data to network dropouts and hardware faults. The standard remedy is a disjointed "impute-then-detect" pipeline whose imputer is trained only for Mean Squared Error (MSE). Such an imputer fills a missing block with the most probable normal pattern: a partially observed anomaly is smoothed back toward normality, and boundary artifacts on normal data raise false alarms. We call this imputation bias and propose the Task-Aware Diffusion Refiner (TADR), a conditional diffusion refiner trained against the loss landscape of a frozen downstream detector.