arXiv Computer Vision

Probe-VAD: Ordinal Likelihood Probing for Training-Free Video Anomaly Detection

Probe‑VAD introduces an ordinal binary‑probing framework that leverages frozen vision‑language models for training‑free video anomaly detection. By querying ten ordered severity thresholds and extracting YES/NO continuation likelihoods, it builds a cumulative severity profile that is converted into a continuous anomaly score with isotonic projection for ordinal consistency. Experiments on public benchmarks show that this simple interface yields superior performance at low computational cost, avoiding the limitations of caption‑based compression or restricted numerical scoring.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

Parser-Free VLM Verification for Federated Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection

The paper proposes a lightweight federated multiple‑instance learning (MIL) framework that trains only a compact MIL scorer across distributed clients while using a frozen vision‑language model (VLM) to verify high‑scoring video segments post‑hoc. Two VLM feedback interfaces are explored: a parsed text‑generation interface and a logit‑based interface that derives a continuous anomaly score from next‑token Yes/No probabilities. Experiments on UCF‑Crime with InternVL3.5‑2B and Qwen3‑VL‑2B‑Instruct show that the logit interface consistently improves frame‑level AUC and AP over the MIL baseline without requiring temporal post‑processing, whereas the text‑generation interface is more sensitive to prompts, parsers, and model choice.

By S\'ebastien Thuau, Amira Gran, Siba Haidar, Rachid Chelouah
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

A Unified Score Matching Paradigm for Video Anomaly Detection and Anticipation

The paper introduces Uni-DSM, a unified score-driven framework that uses denoising score matching to model video anomaly patterns for both detection and anticipation. It employs a shared noise-conditioned score transformer backbone with scene-dependent embeddings and motion-aware weighting, and differentiates between VAD and VAA through autoregressive denoising and a self-distilled denoising mechanism. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance for both tasks while maintaining high efficiency.

By Congqi Cao, Zhenhe Liang, Hanwen Zhang, Yifan Zhao, Qinyi Lv, Lingtong Min, Yanning Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Cog-VADU: A Training-Free Cognitive Reasoning Framework for Video Anomaly Detection and Understanding

Cog-VADU is a training‑free framework that transforms video anomaly detection into a sequential cognitive reasoning task. It uses Chain‑of‑Anomaly Detection Thought Prompting (CoADTP) to create a recurrent reasoning chain across video segments, preserving temporal memory and distinguishing complex anomalies from high‑motion normal activities. A cross‑modal re‑ranking stage aligns textual rationales with visual embeddings to enforce semantic consistency and temporal coherence, yielding competitive zero‑shot performance on multiple VAD benchmarks.

By Mohd Ubaid Wani, Sara Atito, Josef Kittler, Muhammad Awais
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 24

A VLM Answer Is Not an Anomaly Score: Rank Compression in Training-Free Video Anomaly Detection

The paper investigates how vision‑language models (VLMs) can be used for training‑free video anomaly detection (VAD) by answering questions about video segments. It shows that the way a VLM’s output is converted into an anomaly score—either by taking only the most likely answer (generated readout) or by using the full probability distribution (probability readout)—has a significant impact on ranking performance. Across four large VLMs, the probability readout consistently outperforms the generated readout, achieving 5–13 point gains in AUROC or AP, because the generated readout compresses the rank order into only a few distinct scores.

By Inpyo Song, Jangwon Lee
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

Test-time Reinforcement Learning for Anomalous Video Understanding

The paper introduces a test‑time reinforcement learning framework for anomalous video understanding, addressing challenges such as unreliable pseudo‑labels, inadequate reward design, and collapsed group‑relative advantages. It proposes dual‑query consistency filtering, an entropy‑aware consensus reward, and a virtual negative anchor mechanism to improve sample reliability, reward quality, and policy‑gradient signals. Experiments on VAU‑Bench demonstrate significant performance gains, especially on the ECVA subset where accuracy rises from 75.81% to 90.00%.

By Huining Li, Yuxiang Duan, Jiyang Tan, Qian Li, MingCai Chen, Jian Zhang, Xingdong Sheng, Yuntao Du
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Fine-Grained Anomaly Perception in Wild UGC-Enhanced Images: A Comprehensive Dataset and Difference-Fusion Framework

The paper introduces a new task called Quality Anomaly Perception for UGC Image Enhancement (UEAP) and presents the first benchmark dataset, UEAP-4k, featuring fine‑grained annotations of anomaly categories, locations, and severity levels in real‑world user‑generated content. It proposes the Difference‑Fusion Anomaly Perception Method (DFAP‑UGC), which fuses explicit differences between enhanced images and their references using dense spatial querying, regional verification, and quality‑aware ranking to robustly identify localized anomalies. A Locality‑Aware Dynamic Task Prioritization (LADTP) training strategy is also introduced to enable efficient end‑to‑end learning without multi‑stage overhead, and experiments demonstrate that DFAP‑UGC outperforms adapted classical baselines.

By Yan Zhong, Gefei Chen, Qiufang Ma, Zhen Wang, Zhiwei Fan, Lei Shi, Tingting Jiang