# A Unified Reasoning Framework for Holistic Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00962 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00962/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10403/) (2022)
- [Real-world Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04264/) (2018)
- [Do NOT Think That Much for 2+3=? On the Overthinking of o1-Like LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21187/) (2024)
- [Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16419/) (2025)
- [The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06941/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Large Language Models as Commonsense Knowledge for Large-Scale Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14078/) (2023)
- [Weakly-supervised Video Anomaly Detection with Robust Temporal Feature Magnitude Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10030/) (2021)
- [VideoChat-Flash: Hierarchical Compression for Long-Context Video Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00574/) (2024)
- [InternVideo2.5: Empowering Video MLLMs with Long and Rich Context Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12386/) (2025)
- [MIST: Multiple Instance Self-Training Framework for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01633/) (2021)
- [VadCLIP: Adapting Vision-Language Models for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11681/) (2023)
- [UBnormal: New Benchmark for Supervised Open-Set Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08644/) (2021)
- [Dual Memory Units with Uncertainty Regulation for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05160/) (2023)
- [MGFN: Magnitude-Contrastive Glance-and-Focus Network for Weakly-Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15098/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Single-Scene Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05993/) (2020)
- [Harnessing Large Language Models for Training-free Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01014/) (2024)
- [Flash-VStream: Efficient Real-Time Understanding for Long Video Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23825/) (2025)
- [Holmes-VAU: Towards Long-term Video Anomaly Understanding at Any Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06171/) (2024)
- [CLIP-TSA: CLIP-Assisted Temporal Self-Attention for Weakly-Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05136/) (2022)
- [GODS: Generalized One-class Discriminative Subspaces for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05884/) (2019)
- [Holmes-VAD: Towards Unbiased and Explainable Video Anomaly Detection via Multi-modal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12235/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models are Visual Reasoning Coordinators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15166/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07042/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Learning to Watch: Active Video Anomaly Understanding via Interleaved Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00622/) (2026)
- [TAU-R1: Visual Language Model for Traffic Anomaly Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19098/) (2026)
- [SphereVAD: Training-Free Video Anomaly Detection via Geodesic Inference on the Unit Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08003/) (2026)
- [Is Video Anomaly Detection Misframed? Evidence from LLM-Based and Multi-Scene Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12725/) (2026)
- [Probe-VAD: Ordinal Likelihood Probing for Training-Free Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17211/) (2026)
- [Towards Training-free Multimodal Hate Localisation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09637/) (2026)
- [O-VAD: Industrial Video Anomaly Detection through Object-Centric Tracking and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18142/) (2026)
- [Look Inside Each Video: Rethinking How Video Anomaly Detection Is Evaluated](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21854/) (2026)
- [ReactVAU: A Slow-Fast Decoupled Framework for Streaming Video Anomaly Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07941/) (2026)
- [Representation--Behavior Alignment for Explainable Weakly-Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05129/) (2026)
- [RoMod: Temporal Routing Modulation via Mixture-of-Experts for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05131/) (2026)
- [Anomaly-Guided Observation and Two-Level Semantic Feedback for Training-Free Video Anomaly Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16324/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most video-anomaly research stops at frame-wise detection, offering little insight into why an event is abnormal, typically outputting only frame-wise anomaly scores without spatial or semantic context. Recent video anomaly localization and video anomaly understanding methods improve explainability but remain data-dependent and task-specific. We propose a unified reasoning framework that bridges the gap between temporal detection, spatial localization, and textual explanation. Our approach is built upon a chained test-time reasoning process that sequentially connects these tasks, enabling holistic zero-shot anomaly analysis without any additional training. Specifically, our approach leverages intra-task reasoning to refine temporal detections and inter-task chaining for spatial and semantic understanding, yielding improved interpretability and generalization in a fully zero-shot manner. Without any additional data or gradients, our method achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across multiple video anomaly detection, localization, and explanation benchmarks. The results demonstrate that careful prompt design with task-wise chaining can unlock the reasoning power of foundation models, enabling practical, interpretable video anomaly analysis in a fully zero-shot manner. Project Page: https://rathgrith.github.io/Unified_Frame_VAA/.