VisPower: Curriculum-Guided Multimodal Alignment for Fine-Grained Anomaly Perception in Power Systems

Precise perception of subtle anomalies in power equipment—such as insulator cracks, conductor corrosion, or foreign intrusions—is vital for ensuring the reliability of smart grids. However, foundational vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP exhibit poor domain transfer and fail to capture minute defect semantics. We propose VisPower, a curriculum-guided multimodal alignment framework that progressively enhances fine-grained perception through two training stages: (1) Semantic Grounding, leveraging 100 K long-caption pairs to establish a robust linguistic-visual foundation, and (2) Contrastive Refinement, using 24 K region-level and hard-negative samples to strengthen discrimination among visually similar anomalies. Trained on our curated PowerAnomalyVL dataset, VisPower achieves an 18.4% absolute gain in zero-shot retrieval accuracy and a 16.8% improvement in open-vocabulary defect detection (OV-DD) over strong CLIP baselines. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of curriculum-based multimodal alignment for high-stakes industrial anomaly perception.