# Text-guided Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00524 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00524/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [EVA-CLIP: Improved Training Techniques for CLIP at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15389/) (2023)
- [Real-world Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04264/) (2018)
- [Future Frame Prediction for Anomaly Detection -- A New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09867/) (2017)
- [Learning Memory-guided Normality for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13228/) (2020)
- [Graph Convolutional Label Noise Cleaner: Train a Plug-and-play Action Classifier for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07256/) (2019)
- [VadCLIP: Adapting Vision-Language Models for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11681/) (2023)
- [PhysFormer: Facial Video-based Physiological Measurement with Temporal Difference Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12082/) (2021)
- [Street Scene: A new dataset and evaluation protocol for video anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.05872/) (2019)
- [Harnessing Large Language Models for Training-free Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01014/) (2024)
- [A Background-Agnostic Framework with Adversarial Training for Abnormal Event Detection in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12328/) (2020)
- [Holmes-VAU: Towards Long-term Video Anomaly Understanding at Any Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06171/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07042/) (2023)
- [Follow the Rules: Reasoning for Video Anomaly Detection with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10299/) (2024)
- [FiLo: Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection by Fine-Grained Description and High-Quality Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13671/) (2024)
- [Hawk: Learning to Understand Open-World Video Anomalies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16886/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Micro-action Recognition: Dataset, Methods, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05234/) (2024)
- [Uncovering What, Why and How: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Causation Understanding of Video Anomaly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00181/) (2024)
- [Towards Surveillance Video-and-Language Understanding: New Dataset, Baselines, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13925/) (2023)
- [Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection and Localization with Spatio-Temporal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05905/) (2024)
- [EventVAD: Training-Free Event-Aware Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13092/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning for Video Anomaly Detection: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05383/) (2024)
- [Joint Skeletal and Semantic Embedding Loss for Micro-gesture Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10624/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Rethinking the Role of Feature Engineering and Learning Strategies in Few-Shot Hidden Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31249/) (2026)
- [TAU-Bench: From Anomaly Instance Tracking to Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05699/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Subtle abnormal events in videos often manifest as weak spatio-temporal cues that are easily overlooked by conventional anomaly detection systems. Existing video anomaly detection approaches typically provide coarse binary anomaly decisions without interpretable evidence, while large vision-language models (LVLMs) can produce textual judgments but lack precise localization of subtle visual signals. To address this gap, we propose Text-guided Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding T-VAU, a framework that grounds subtle anomaly evidence into multimodal reasoning. Specifically, we introduce an Anomaly Heatmap Decoder (AHD) that performs visual-textual feature alignment to extract pixel-level spatio-temporal anomaly heatmaps from intermediate visual representations. We further design a Region-aware Anomaly Encoder (RAE) that converts these heatmaps into structured prompt embeddings, enabling the LVLM to perform anomaly detection, localization, and semantic explanation in a unified reasoning pipeline. To support fine-grained supervision, we construct a target-level fine-grained video-text anomaly dataset derived from ShanghaiTech and UBnormal with detailed annotations of object appearance, localization, and motion trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that T-VAU significantly improves anomaly localization and textual reasoning performance on both benchmarks, achieving strong results in BLEU-4 metrics and Yes/No decision accuracy while providing interpretable pixel-level spatio-temporal evidence for anomaly understanding. The code will be available at https://github.com/momiji-bit/T-VAU.