ActiveInspect: GRPO-Optimized Multi-Sensor Evidence Selection for Industrial Defect Detection

Automated visual inspection is a cornerstone of modern manufacturing quality assurance, yet the effectiveness of any detection system is fundamentally bounded by the informativeness of the observations it receives. Most vision–language model (VLM) and reinforcement learning methods for industrial defect detection assume a fixed set of observations and optimize only the reasoning applied to them. We introduce ActiveInspect, which formulates inspection as budget-constrained sequential selection of multi-view, multi-modal evidence. Starting from a pre-acquired observation pool, a single policy selects an additional view or modality, zooms into a candidate region, retrieves a matched normal reference, or terminates with a verdict. The policy is initialized by perception-activated supervised fine-tuning (PA-SFT) and subsequently optimized by group relative policy optimization (GRPO) using inspection-specific rewards. Depth and point-cloud measurements are converted into VLM-compatible geometric renderings, while a structured memory integrates evidence across inspection steps. Evaluation on Real-IAD D3, Real-IAD, MVTec 3D-AD, MVTec-AD, VisA, and MMAD demonstrates a consistent improvement in the accuracy–observation trade-off. On Real-IAD D3, ActiveInspect increases image-level area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (I-AUROC) from 0.890 to 0.906 (mean over three training seeds; p<0.01) relative to the passive D3M baseline while reducing the average observation count from 3.0 to 2.7. It reaches 99.8% of the I-AUROC obtained by exhaustive evaluation of all 15 observations while using 18% of that observation count, and it reduces per-sample inference time by a factor of 5.3 relative to the exhaustive scan. The largest gains occur for geometry-dependent defects, including dents, warping, and concavities.