# DA-Flow: Dual Attention Normalizing Flow for Skeleton-based Video Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02976 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02976/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [NICE: Non-linear Independent Components Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.8516/) (2014)
- [Neural Spline Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04032/) (2019)
- [Future Frame Prediction for Anomaly Detection -- A New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09867/) (2017)
- [Residual Gated Graph ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07553/) (2017)
- [Learning Temporal Regularity in Video Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04574/) (2016)
- [Coordinate Attention for Efficient Mobile Network Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02907/) (2021)
- [AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03375/) (2022)
- [Anomaly Detection in Video via Self-Supervised and Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07491/) (2020)
- [A Hybrid Video Anomaly Detection Framework via Memory-Augmented Flow Reconstruction and Flow-Guided Frame Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06852/) (2021)
- [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)
- [UBnormal: New Benchmark for Supervised Open-Set Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08644/) (2021)
- [Constructing Stronger and Faster Baselines for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15125/) (2021)
- [Pose Flow: Efficient Online Pose Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00977/) (2018)
- [Rotate to Attend: Convolutional Triplet Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03045/) (2020)
- [Video Anomaly Detection by Solving Decoupled Spatio-Temporal Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10172/) (2022)
- [Normalizing Flows for Human Pose Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10946/) (2022)
- [Multi-timescale Trajectory Prediction for Abnormal Human Activity Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04321/) (2019)
- [Rewrite the Stars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19967/) (2024)
- [SSMTL++: Revisiting Self-Supervised Multi-Task Learning for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08003/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Motion Conditioned Diffusion Model for Skeleton-based Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07205/) (2023)
- [Cubic-Spline Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02145/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [RC-NF: Robot-Conditioned Normalizing Flow for Real-Time Anomaly Detection in Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11106/) (2026)
- [Bounding-Box Trajectories Matter for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21957/) (2026)
- [Action Hints: Semantic Typicality and Context Uniqueness for Generalizable Skeleton-based Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11058/) (2025)
- [VADMamba++: Efficient Video Anomaly Detection via Hybrid Modeling in Grayscale Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00360/) (2026)
- [3D Human-Human Interaction Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13560/) (2025)
- [Motion Semantics Guided Normalizing Flow for Privacy-Preserving Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26745/) (2026)
- [Reliability-Aware Prototype Calibration for Frozen Pose-Flow Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20312/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cooperation between temporal convolutional networks (TCN) and graph convolutional networks (GCN) as a processing module has shown promising results in skeleton-based video anomaly detection (SVAD). However, to maintain a lightweight model with low computational and storage complexity, shallow GCN and TCN blocks are constrained by small receptive fields and a lack of cross-dimension interaction capture. To tackle this limitation, we propose a lightweight module called the Dual Attention Module (DAM) for capturing cross-dimension interaction relationships in spatio-temporal skeletal data. It employs the frame attention mechanism to identify the most significant frames and the skeleton attention mechanism to capture broader relationships across fixed partitions with minimal parameters and flops. Furthermore, the proposed Dual Attention Normalizing Flow (DA-Flow) integrates the DAM as a post-processing unit after GCN within the normalizing flow framework. Simulations show that the proposed model is robust against noise and negative samples. Experimental results show that DA-Flow reaches competitive or better performance than the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in terms of the micro AUC metric with the fewest number of parameters. Moreover, we found that even without training, simply using random projection without dimensionality reduction on skeleton data enables substantial anomaly detection capabilities.