# Instance-Aligned Captions for Explainable Video Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08155 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08155/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (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)
- [GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03356/) (2023)
- [Future Frame Prediction for Anomaly Detection -- A New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09867/) (2017)
- [Learning Temporal Regularity in Video Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04574/) (2016)
- [Weakly-supervised Video Anomaly Detection with Robust Temporal Feature Magnitude Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10030/) (2021)
- [PixelLM: Pixel Reasoning with Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02228/) (2023)
- [Language as Queries for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00487/) (2022)
- [MIST: Multiple Instance Self-Training Framework for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01633/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Referring Video Object Segmentation with Multimodal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14821/) (2021)
- [VadCLIP: Adapting Vision-Language Models for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11681/) (2023)
- [Where Does It Exist: Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding for Multi-Form Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06891/) (2020)
- [Deep Structured Energy Based Models for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07717/) (2016)
- [One Token to Seg Them All: Language Instructed Reasoning Segmentation in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19603/) (2024)
- [MGFN: Magnitude-Contrastive Glance-and-Focus Network for Weakly-Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15098/) (2022)
- [Harnessing Large Language Models for Training-free Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01014/) (2024)
- [Holmes-VAD: Towards Unbiased and Explainable Video Anomaly Detection via Multi-modal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12235/) (2024)
- [OnlineRefer: A Simple Online Baseline for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09356/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Video Event Restoration Based on Keyframes for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05112/) (2023)
- [Localizing Anomalies from Weakly-Labeled Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08944/) (2020)
- [PG-Video-LLaVA: Pixel Grounding Large Video-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13435/) (2023)
- [VideoGLaMM: A Large Multimodal Model for Pixel-Level Visual Grounding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04923/) (2024)
- [Text Prompt with Normality Guidance for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08531/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Bounding-Box Trajectories Matter for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21957/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Open-World Video Anomaly Detection: Diagnosing Definition Blindness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20780/) (2026)
- [A VLM Answer Is Not an Anomaly Score: Rank Compression Across Image and Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21244/) (2026)
- [Agri-CPJ: A Training-Free Explainable Framework for Agricultural Pest Diagnosis Using Caption-Prompt-Judge and LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23701/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Explainable video anomaly detection (VAD) is crucial for safety-critical applications, yet even with recent progress, much of the research still lacks spatial grounding, making the explanations unverifiable. This limitation is especially pronounced in multi-entity interactions, where existing explainable VAD methods often produce incomplete or visually misaligned descriptions, reducing their trustworthiness. To address these challenges, we introduce instance-aligned captions that link each textual claim to specific object instances with appearance and motion attributes. Our framework captures who caused the anomaly, what each entity was doing, whom it affected, and where the explanationis grounded, enabling verifiable and actionable reasoning. We annotate eight widely used VAD benchmarks and extend the 360-degree egocentric dataset, VIEW360, with 868 additional videos, eight locations, and four new anomaly types, creating VIEW360+, a comprehensive testbed for explainable VAD. Experiments show that our instance-level spatially grounded captions reveal significant limitations in current LLM- and VLM-based methods while providing a robust benchmark for future research in trustworthy and interpretable anomaly detection.