# Follow the Rules: Reasoning for Video Anomaly Detection with Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10299 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10299/

## Key facts

- Cited by 57 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 49 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Chain-of-thought reasoning for driving](https://mlsanity.com/lr/chain-of-thought-reasoning-for-driving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [Certified Adversarial Robustness via Randomized Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.02918/) (2019)
- [CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03079/) (2023)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [Towards Open Set Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06233/) (2015)
- [Future Frame Prediction for Anomaly Detection -- A New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09867/) (2017)
- [PandaGPT: One Model To Instruction-Follow Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16355/) (2023)
- [Recognize Anything: A Strong Image Tagging Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03514/) (2023)
- [Learning Memory-guided Normality for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13228/) (2020)
- [A Unified Model for Multi-class Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03687/) (2022)
- [Learning Temporal Regularity in Video Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04574/) (2016)
- [AnomalyGPT: Detecting Industrial Anomalies Using Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15366/) (2023)
- [Active Prompting with Chain-of-Thought for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12246/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Towards Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection and Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07601/) (2025)
- [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)
- [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)
- [AnyAnomaly: Zero-Shot Customizable Video Anomaly Detection with LVLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04504/) (2025)
- [A Unified Reasoning Framework for Holistic Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00962/) (2025)
- [StimuVAR: Spatiotemporal Stimuli-aware Video Affective Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00304/) (2024)
- [Language-guided Open-world Video Anomaly Detection under Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13160/) (2025)
- [Track Any Anomalous Object: A Granular Video Anomaly Detection Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05175/) (2025)
- [Foundation Models and Transformers for Anomaly Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15905/) (2025)
- [VAGU & GtS: LLM-Based Benchmark and Framework for Joint Video Anomaly Grounding and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21507/) (2025)
- [AnomalyMoE: Towards a Language-free Generalist Model for Unified Visual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06203/) (2025)
- [Aligning Effective Tokens with Video Anomaly in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06350/) (2025)
- [Unlocking Vision-Language Models for Video Anomaly Detection via Fine-Grained Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02155/) (2025)
- [No Need For Real Anomaly: MLLM Empowered Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19248/) (2026)
- [RC-NF: Robot-Conditioned Normalizing Flow for Real-Time Anomaly Detection in Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11106/) (2026)
- [AVadCLIP: Audio-Visual Collaboration for Robust Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04495/) (2025)
- [Towards Adaptive Human-centric Video Anomaly Detection: A Comprehensive Framework and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14329/) (2024)
- [Egocentric and Exocentric Methods: A Short Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20621/) (2024)
- [A2Seek: Towards Reasoning-Centric Benchmark for Aerial Anomaly Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21962/) (2025)
- [Pistachio: Towards Synthetic, Balanced, and Long-Form Video Anomaly Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19474/) (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)
- [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)
- [Leveraging Multimodal LLM Descriptions of Activity for Explainable Semi-Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14896/) (2025)
- [VADER: Towards Causal Video Anomaly Understanding with Relation-Aware Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07299/) (2025)
- [Instance-Aligned Captions for Explainable Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08155/) (2026)
- [Learning to Watch: Active Video Anomaly Understanding via Interleaved Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00622/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) is crucial for applications such as security surveillance and autonomous driving. However, existing VAD methods provide little rationale behind detection, hindering public trust in real-world deployments. In this paper, we approach VAD with a reasoning framework. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown revolutionary reasoning ability, we find that their direct use falls short of VAD. Specifically, the implicit knowledge pre-trained in LLMs focuses on general context and thus may not apply to every specific real-world VAD scenario, leading to inflexibility and inaccuracy. To address this, we propose AnomalyRuler, a novel rule-based reasoning framework for VAD with LLMs. AnomalyRuler comprises two main stages: induction and deduction. In the induction stage, the LLM is fed with few-shot normal reference samples and then summarizes these normal patterns to induce a set of rules for detecting anomalies. The deduction stage follows the induced rules to spot anomalous frames in test videos. Additionally, we design rule aggregation, perception smoothing, and robust reasoning strategies to further enhance AnomalyRuler's robustness. AnomalyRuler is the first reasoning approach for the one-class VAD task, which requires only few-normal-shot prompting without the need for full-shot training, thereby enabling fast adaption to various VAD scenarios. Comprehensive experiments across four VAD benchmarks demonstrate AnomalyRuler's state-of-the-art detection performance and reasoning ability. AnomalyRuler is open-source and available at: https://github.com/Yuchen413/AnomalyRuler