# Weakly-supervised Video Anomaly Detection with Robust Temporal Feature Magnitude Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.10030 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10030/

## Key facts

- Cited by 230 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [Real-world Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04264/) (2018)
- [Memorizing Normality to Detect Anomaly: Memory-augmented Deep Autoencoder for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02639/) (2019)
- [Future Frame Prediction for Anomaly Detection -- A New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09867/) (2017)
- [Uninformed Students: Student-Teacher Anomaly Detection with Discriminative Latent Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02357/) (2019)
- [Exploring Self-attention for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13621/) (2020)
- [Deep Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02694/) (2019)
- [Learning Memory-guided Normality for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13228/) (2020)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection Using Geometric Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10917/) (2018)
- [Learning Temporal Regularity in Video Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04574/) (2016)
- [Not only Look, but also Listen: Learning Multimodal Violence Detection under Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04687/) (2020)
- [Classification-Based Anomaly Detection for General Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02359/) (2020)
- [Adversarially Learned One-Class Classifier for Novelty Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09088/) (2018)
- [OCGAN: One-class Novelty Detection Using GANs with Constrained Latent Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08550/) (2019)
- [Learning Fine-grained Image Similarity with Deep Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1404.4661/) (2014)
- [Graph Convolutional Label Noise Cleaner: Train a Plug-and-play Action Classifier for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07256/) (2019)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Deviation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08623/) (2019)
- [Latent Space Autoregression for Novelty Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01653/) (2018)
- [Anomaly Detection in Video via Self-Supervised and Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07491/) (2020)
- [Anomaly Detection in Video Sequence with Appearance-Motion Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06351/) (2019)
- [Object-centric Auto-encoders and Dummy Anomalies for Abnormal Event Detection in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04960/) (2018)
- [Learning Regularity in Skeleton Trajectories for Anomaly Detection in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03295/) (2019)
- [Graph Embedded Pose Clustering for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11850/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Single-Scene Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05993/) (2020)
- [Self-trained Deep Ordinal Regression for End-to-End Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06780/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 230)

- [VadCLIP: Adapting Vision-Language Models for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11681/) (2023)
- [Generative Cooperative Learning for Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03962/) (2022)
- [UBnormal: New Benchmark for Supervised Open-Set Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08644/) (2021)
- [Dual Memory Units with Uncertainty Regulation for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05160/) (2023)
- [MGFN: Magnitude-Contrastive Glance-and-Focus Network for Weakly-Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15098/) (2022)
- [Harnessing Large Language Models for Training-free Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01014/) (2024)
- [Pixel-wise Energy-biased Abstention Learning for Anomaly Segmentation on Complex Urban Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12264/) (2021)
- [Holmes-VAU: Towards Long-term Video Anomaly Understanding at Any Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06171/) (2024)
- [Explainable Deep Few-shot Anomaly Detection with Deviation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00462/) (2021)
- [CLIP-TSA: CLIP-Assisted Temporal Self-Attention for Weakly-Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05136/) (2022)
- [Unbiased Multiple Instance Learning for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12369/) (2023)
- [Holmes-VAD: Towards Unbiased and Explainable Video Anomaly Detection via Multi-modal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12235/) (2024)
- [Generalized Video Anomaly Event Detection: Systematic Taxonomy and Comparison of Deep Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05087/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07042/) (2023)
- [Advancing Video Anomaly Detection: A Concise Review and a New Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04857/) (2024)
- [Text Prompt with Normality Guidance for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08531/) (2024)
- [Hawk: Learning to Understand Open-World Video Anomalies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16886/) (2024)
- [Exploiting Completeness and Uncertainty of Pseudo Labels for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04090/) (2022)
- [Video Anomaly Detection and Explanation via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05702/) (2024)
- [Constrained Contrastive Distribution Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Localisation in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03423/) (2021)
- [SSMTL++: Revisiting Self-Supervised Multi-Task Learning for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08003/) (2022)
- [Learning Prompt-Enhanced Context Features for Weakly-Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14451/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Semantic Contrast for Scene-aware Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13051/) (2023)
- [Delving into CLIP latent space for Video Anomaly Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02835/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for Video Anomaly Detection: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05383/) (2024)
- [Modality-Aware Contrastive Instance Learning with Self-Distillation for Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Violence Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05500/) (2022)
- [Towards Open Set Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11113/) (2022)
- [Towards Video Anomaly Retrieval from Video Anomaly Detection: New Benchmarks and Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12545/) (2023)
- [Anomaly Heterogeneity Learning for Open-set Supervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12790/) (2023)
- [VERA: Explainable Video Anomaly Detection via Verbalized Learning of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01095/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Anomaly detection with weakly supervised video-level labels is typically formulated as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem, in which we aim to identify snippets containing abnormal events, with each video represented as a bag of video snippets. Although current methods show effective detection performance, their recognition of the positive instances, i.e., rare abnormal snippets in the abnormal videos, is largely biased by the dominant negative instances, especially when the abnormal events are subtle anomalies that exhibit only small differences compared with normal events. This issue is exacerbated in many methods that ignore important video temporal dependencies. To address this issue, we introduce a novel and theoretically sound method, named Robust Temporal Feature Magnitude learning (RTFM), which trains a feature magnitude learning function to effectively recognise the positive instances, substantially improving the robustness of the MIL approach to the negative instances from abnormal videos. RTFM also adapts dilated convolutions and self-attention mechanisms to capture long- and short-range temporal dependencies to learn the feature magnitude more faithfully. Extensive experiments show that the RTFM-enabled MIL model (i) outperforms several state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on four benchmark data sets (ShanghaiTech, UCF-Crime, XD-Violence and UCSD-Peds) and (ii) achieves significantly improved subtle anomaly discriminability and sample efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/tianyu0207/RTFM.