# Towards Open Set Video Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.11113 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11113/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05394/) (2017)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11334/) (2021)
- [Evidential Deep Learning to Quantify Classification Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01768/) (2018)
- [Improving Variational Inference with Inverse Autoregressive Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04934/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Towards Open Set Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06233/) (2015)
- [Likelihood Ratios for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02845/) (2019)
- [Future Frame Prediction for Anomaly Detection -- A New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09867/) (2017)
- [How does Disagreement Help Generalization against Label Corruption?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04215/) (2019)
- [Recent Advances in Open Set Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08581/) (2018)
- [VOS: Learning What You Don't Know by Virtual Outlier Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01197/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Decoupling "when to update" from "how to update"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02613/) (2017)
- [Weakly-supervised Video Anomaly Detection with Robust Temporal Feature Magnitude Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10030/) (2021)
- [Graph Convolutional Label Noise Cleaner: Train a Plug-and-play Action Classifier for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07256/) (2019)
- [Posterior Network: Uncertainty Estimation without OOD Samples via Density-Based Pseudo-Counts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09239/) (2020)
- [Active Bias: Training More Accurate Neural Networks by Emphasizing High Variance Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07433/) (2017)
- [Learning Placeholders for Open-Set Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15086/) (2021)
- [Hybrid Models for Open Set Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12506/) (2020)
- [Evidential Deep Learning for Open Set Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10161/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Single-Scene Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05993/) (2020)
- [Sample Selection with Uncertainty of Losses for Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00445/) (2021)
- [Cloze Test Helps: Effective Video Anomaly Detection via Learning to Complete Video Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11988/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [HoloAssist: an Egocentric Human Interaction Dataset for Interactive AI Assistants in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17024/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07042/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for Video Anomaly Detection: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05383/) (2024)
- [Anomaly Heterogeneity Learning for Open-set Supervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12790/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Evidential Deep Learning and Its Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04720/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Essential and Nonessential Settings of Evidential Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00393/) (2024)
- [Anomize: Better Open Vocabulary Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18094/) (2025)
- [Video Anomaly Detection via Spatio-Temporal Pseudo-Anomaly Generation : A Unified Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16514/) (2023)
- [Distribution Prototype Diffusion Learning for Open-set Supervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20981/) (2025)
- [Language-guided Open-world Video Anomaly Detection under Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13160/) (2025)
- [VAGU & GtS: LLM-Based Benchmark and Framework for Joint Video Anomaly Grounding and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21507/) (2025)
- [No Need For Real Anomaly: MLLM Empowered Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19248/) (2026)
- [Cross-Domain Learning for Video Anomaly Detection with Limited Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05191/) (2024)
- [Human-Centric Video Anomaly Detection Through Spatio-Temporal Pose Tokenization and Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15185/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language Models Assisted Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14109/) (2024)
- [Are you Struggling? Dataset and Baselines for Struggle Determination in Assembly Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11057/) (2024)
- [The Evolution of Video Anomaly Detection: A Unified Framework from DNN to MLLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21649/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Video Anomaly Detection via Deep Learning: Human, Vehicle, and Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14203/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Video Analytics in Cloud-Edge-Terminal Collaborative Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06581/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Open-World Video Anomaly Detection: Diagnosing Definition Blindness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20780/) (2026)
- [Mistake Attribution: Fine-Grained Mistake Understanding in Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20525/) (2025)
- [CADE: Continual Weakly-supervised Video Anomaly Detection with Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06840/) (2025)
- [ESOM: Efficiently Understanding Streaming Video Anomalies with Open-world Dynamic Definitions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07772/) (2026)
- [Advancing Video Anomaly Detection: A Bi-Directional Hybrid Framework for Enhanced Single- and Multi-Task Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14753/) (2025)
- [What Can We Learn from Harry Potter? An Exploratory Study of Visual Representation Learning from Atypical Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21770/) (2025)
- [PA-VAD: Diffusion-Based Pseudo-Only Video Anomaly Detection via Domain-Aligned Memory Updates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06845/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open Set Video Anomaly Detection (OpenVAD) aims to identify abnormal events from video data where both known anomalies and novel ones exist in testing. Unsupervised models learned solely from normal videos are applicable to any testing anomalies but suffer from a high false positive rate. In contrast, weakly supervised methods are effective in detecting known anomalies but could fail in an open world. We develop a novel weakly supervised method for the OpenVAD problem by integrating evidential deep learning (EDL) and normalizing flows (NFs) into a multiple instance learning (MIL) framework. Specifically, we propose to use graph neural networks and triplet loss to learn discriminative features for training the EDL classifier, where the EDL is capable of identifying the unknown anomalies by quantifying the uncertainty. Moreover, we develop an uncertainty-aware selection strategy to obtain clean anomaly instances and a NFs module to generate the pseudo anomalies. Our method is superior to existing approaches by inheriting the advantages of both the unsupervised NFs and the weakly-supervised MIL framework. Experimental results on multiple real-world video datasets show the effectiveness of our method.