In Industry 5.0, smart manufacturing brings additional intricacies and novel data processing challenges. Given the evolving nature of manufacturing processes and the inherent complexity of data, including noise and missing entries, achieving accurate anomaly detection becomes even more intricate. Conventional methods often miss nuanced anomalies, especially when dealing with high-dimensional, multivariate, non-stationary data. These data types are typical of smart manufacturing environments. Hence, many recent approaches have embraced deep learning to confront these challenges, making use of diverse attention mechanisms to acquire data representations. However, in manufacturing, where the dynamics of time series data change over time, methods relying solely on pointwise or pairwise representations often fall short. Thus, ensuring product quality and operational integrity calls for even more advanced methodologies. The deficiency lies in the capability of state-of-the-art models to effectively capture abnormal patterns while considering both local and global contextual information. This challenge is compounded by the rarity of anomalies, making it exceedingly challenging to establish substantial associations between individual abnormal points and the entire time series. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the “Adaptive Adversarial Transformer” as a novel deep learning technique that combines Transformer architecture with an anomaly attention mechanism and Adversarial Learning. Our Model effectively captures intricate temporal patterns, distinguishes normal and anomalous behaviors, and dynamically adjusts thresholds to align with the evolving dynamics of time-series data. Empirical validation on four benchmark datasets and three real-world manufacturing datasets demonstrates our model’s effectiveness compared to the state-of-the-art, as evidenced by the F1-Score.