# Holmes-VAD: Towards Unbiased and Explainable Video Anomaly Detection via Multi-modal LLM

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12235 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12235/

## Key facts

- Cited by 64 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Chart understanding and anomaly detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 57 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Chart understanding and anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/chart-understanding-and-anomaly-detection/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16199/) (2023)
- [CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03079/) (2023)
- [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)
- [MM-REACT: Prompting ChatGPT for Multimodal Reasoning and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11381/) (2023)
- [Future Frame Prediction for Anomaly Detection -- A New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09867/) (2017)
- [LanguageBind: Extending Video-Language Pretraining to N-modality by Language-based Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01852/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [AnomalyGPT: Detecting Industrial Anomalies Using Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15366/) (2023)
- [MIST: Multiple Instance Self-Training Framework for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01633/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Explainable and Interpretable Multimodal Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02104/) (2024)
- [SafeWatch: An Efficient Safety-Policy Following Video Guardrail Model with Transparent Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06878/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Anomaly and Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01980/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning for Video Anomaly Detection: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05383/) (2024)
- [VERA: Explainable Video Anomaly Detection via Verbalized Learning of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01095/) (2024)
- [Vad-R1: Towards Video Anomaly Reasoning via Perception-to-Cognition Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19877/) (2025)
- [VAU-R1: Advancing Video Anomaly Understanding via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23504/) (2025)
- [PANDA: Towards Generalist Video Anomaly Detection via Agentic AI Engineer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26386/) (2025)
- [VADTree: Explainable Training-Free Video Anomaly Detection via Hierarchical Granularity-Aware Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22693/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning Advancements in Anomaly Detection: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13195/) (2025)
- [Do Language Models Understand Time?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13845/) (2024)
- [Flashback: Memory-Driven Zero-shot, Real-time Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15205/) (2025)
- [A Unified Reasoning Framework for Holistic Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00962/) (2025)
- [Sherlock: Towards Multi-scene Video Abnormal Event Extraction and Localization via a Global-local Spatial-sensitive LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18863/) (2025)
- [Towards Visual Discrimination and Reasoning of Real-World Physical Dynamics: Physics-Grounded Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03562/) (2025)
- [Scone: Bridging Composition and Distinction in Subject-Driven Image Generation via Unified Understanding-Generation Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12675/) (2025)
- [Exploring What Why and How: A Multifaceted Benchmark for Causation Understanding of Video Anomaly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07183/) (2024)
- [HiProbe-VAD: Video Anomaly Detection via Hidden States Probing in Tuning-Free Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17394/) (2025)
- [Quo Vadis, Anomaly Detection? LLMs and VLMs in the Spotlight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18298/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Unlocking Vision-Language Models for Video Anomaly Detection via Fine-Grained Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02155/) (2025)
- [SmartHome-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Video Anomaly Detection in Smart Homes Using Multi-Modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12992/) (2025)
- [HeadHunt-VAD: Hunting Robust Anomaly-Sensitive Heads in MLLM for Tuning-Free Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17601/) (2025)
- [Instance-Aligned Captions for Explainable Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08155/) (2026)
- [Steering and Rectifying Latent Representation Manifolds in Frozen Multi-modal LLMs for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.24021/) (2026)
- [Detecting Contextual Anomalies by Discovering Consistent Spatial Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08470/) (2025)
- [Foundation Models for Anomaly Detection: Vision and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06911/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models for Crash Detection in Video: A Survey of Methods, Datasets, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02074/) (2025)
- [Evaluation of Vision-LLMs in Surveillance Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23190/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Towards open-ended Video Anomaly Detection (VAD), existing methods often exhibit biased detection when faced with challenging or unseen events and lack interpretability. To address these drawbacks, we propose Holmes-VAD, a novel framework that leverages precise temporal supervision and rich multimodal instructions to enable accurate anomaly localization and comprehensive explanations. Firstly, towards unbiased and explainable VAD system, we construct the first large-scale multimodal VAD instruction-tuning benchmark, i.e., VAD-Instruct50k. This dataset is created using a carefully designed semi-automatic labeling paradigm. Efficient single-frame annotations are applied to the collected untrimmed videos, which are then synthesized into high-quality analyses of both abnormal and normal video clips using a robust off-the-shelf video captioner and a large language model (LLM). Building upon the VAD-Instruct50k dataset, we develop a customized solution for interpretable video anomaly detection. We train a lightweight temporal sampler to select frames with high anomaly response and fine-tune a multimodal large language model (LLM) to generate explanatory content. Extensive experimental results validate the generality and interpretability of the proposed Holmes-VAD, establishing it as a novel interpretable technique for real-world video anomaly analysis. To support the community, our benchmark and model will be publicly available at https://holmesvad.github.io.