TAU-Agent is a retrieval‑augmented framework designed for traffic anomaly understanding in transportation videos. It uses a central retrieval agent to coordinate a Video Captioning Tool and an Open‑Vocabulary Tracking Tool, gathering captions, temporal intervals, and object trajectories relevant to a query. The collected evidence, along with sampled frames and the query, is fed into a fine‑tuned vision‑language model that reasons and generates an answer. TAU-Agent was evaluated on the AI City Challenge 2026 benchmarks, achieving notable scores across multiple tracks and ranking second, twelfth, and fifth respectively.
By Yuqiang Lin, Yan Shi, Sam Lockyer, Harish Tayyar Madabushi, Adrian Evans, Wenbin Li, Yinhai Wang, Nic Zhang
arXiv:2608. 13031v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic video understanding has become an important problem in intelligent transportation, as road videos provide direct evidence for accidents, violations, and interactions between vehicles and vulnerable road users.
By Peng Li, Qianqian Xu, Shilong Bao, Yangbangyan Jiang, Qingming Huang
The paper introduces TAR (Traffic Anomaly Reasoning) and its evaluation suite TAR-Bench, designed to train and assess video‑language models on tasks beyond simple anomaly detection. TAR offers 44,040 chain‑of‑thought annotations covering 10 tasks across 3,670 CCTV videos, while TAR‑Bench supplies 960 human‑curated test annotations from 80 clips of 17 YouTube videos. Experiments show that strong question‑answering performance does not guarantee temporal or scene reasoning, and multi‑task fine‑tuning on TAR consistently improves model scores, with a 10‑task model outperforming its zero‑shot baseline by 21.4 points. The datasets serve as the official training and evaluation data for AI City Challenge 2026 Track 3.
By Han Zhang, Yilin Zhao, Zaid Pervaiz Bhat, Zheng Tang, Varun Praveen, Vidya N. Murali, David C. Anastasiu, Tomasz Kornuta
arXiv:2608. 11260v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) aims to identify anomalous events and localize their temporal intervals.
By Shibo Gao, Peipei Yang, Xu-Yao Zhang, Linlin Huang
The paper introduces CaC, a coarse‑to‑fine anomaly reward model that uses Vision‑Language Models to first scan globally for anomalous time windows, then ground anomalies spatially, and finally reason with structured spatiotemporal Chain‑of‑Thought. It builds the first large‑scale generated video anomaly dataset with detailed annotations and trains the model through a three‑stage progressive paradigm, including reinforcement learning with Group Relative Policy Optimization. Experiments show CaC improves fine‑grained anomaly detection by 25.7% and reduces generated‑video anomalies by 11.7% while enhancing overall video quality.
By Jiyuan Wang, Huan Ouyang, Jiuzhou Lin, Chunyu Lin, Dewen Fan, Boheng Zhang, Haonan Fan, Honglie Wang, Yiyang Fan, Zhenlong Yuan, Zijun Li, Yongrui Heng, Guosheng Lin, Fan Yang
arXiv:2608. 12843v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-based person anomaly retrieval aims to retrieve pedestrians exhibiting anomalous behaviors from a large image gallery using natural language descriptions.
By Huu-An Vu, Cam Tu Tran Thi, Thanh Toan Le Ngo, Hoang Vo, Do Trung Hieu, Hieu Dinh Trung Pham, Khang Minh Le, Huy Minh Nhat Nguyen
AgentVidBench is a new multi‑hop video question‑answering benchmark designed to evaluate spatial, temporal, and causal reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Unlike existing tests that focus on simple scene queries or global summaries, AgentVidBench includes step‑by‑step solution traces to assess whether agents gather the necessary evidence to justify their answers. Experiments with 12 MLLMs show limited single‑turn performance, but integrating these models into agentic workflows improves both accuracy and trajectory scores, establishing AgentVidBench as a comprehensive testbed for future research on agentic video understanding.
By Seoyeon An, Hyeonseo Jang, Minsu Kim, Chanho Lee, Younghan Park, Kangwook Lee
arXiv:2512. 05277v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances.
By Kevin Cannons, Saeed Ranjbar Alvar, Mohammad Asiful Hossain, Ahmad Rezaei, Mohsen Gholami, Alireza Heidarikhazaei, Zhou Weimin, Yong Zhang, Mohammad Akbari
The paper presents a decoupled framework for sim-to-real traffic scene understanding, separating semantic fact extraction from caption generation. It uses a frozen V-JEPA encoder for predictive scene representations and a lightweight Llama-based predictor for VQA, followed by a training-free structured refinement that leverages statistical priors, inter-question relationships, and temporal consistency. The refined facts are then fed to Qwen3-VL-8B to produce pedestrian and vehicle descriptions, achieving top performance on the 2026 AI City Challenge Track 2 benchmark with 87.09% VQA accuracy and an overall S2 score of 60.0853.
By Nguyen Hoai Thuong Bui, Thanh Nguyen Vo, Trinh Tra Giang Nguyen, Ha Duc Bui
arXiv:2512. 05277v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances.
By Kevin Cannons, Saeed Ranjbar Alvar, Mohammad Asiful Hossain, Ahmad Rezaei, Mohsen Gholami, Alireza Heidarikhazaei, Zhou Weimin, Yong Zhang, Mohammad Akbari
arXiv:2607. 02959v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce VSeek, an agentic framework that transforms long-video question answering (LVQA) from a passive, single-pass perception task into a multi-turn retrieval process.
By Harsh Goel, S P Sharan, Sahil Shah, Minkyu Choi, Joungbin An, Kristen Grauman, Sandeep P. Chinchali
arXiv:2604. 23724v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Expressway video anomaly detection is essential for safety management.
By Xiaowei Mao, Bowen Sui, Weijie Zhang, Yawen Yang, Shengnan Guo, Shilong Zhao, Jiaqi Lin, Tingrui Wu, Youfang Lin, Huaiyu Wan