# No Need For Real Anomaly: MLLM Empowered Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19248 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19248/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [DRAEM -- A discriminatively trained reconstruction embedding for surface anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07610/) (2021)
- [AnomalyCLIP: Object-agnostic Prompt Learning for Zero-shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18961/) (2023)
- [SimpleNet: A Simple Network for Image Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15140/) (2023)
- [Weakly-supervised Video Anomaly Detection with Robust Temporal Feature Magnitude Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10030/) (2021)
- [Adversarially Learned One-Class Classifier for Novelty Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09088/) (2018)
- [A Hybrid Video Anomaly Detection Framework via Memory-Augmented Flow Reconstruction and Flow-Guided Frame Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06852/) (2021)
- [AdaCLIP: Adapting CLIP with Hybrid Learnable Prompts for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15795/) (2024)
- [VadCLIP: Adapting Vision-Language Models for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11681/) (2023)
- [Old is Gold: Redefining the Adversarially Learned One-Class Classifier Training Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07657/) (2020)
- [Generative Cooperative Learning for Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03962/) (2022)
- [Harnessing Large Language Models for Training-free Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01014/) (2024)
- [CLAWS: Clustering Assisted Weakly Supervised Learning with Normalcy Suppression for Anomalous Event Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12077/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Normalizing Flows for Human Pose Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10946/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Anomaly Detection with Conditioned Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15956/) (2023)
- [Video Event Restoration Based on Keyframes for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05112/) (2023)
- [Text Prompt with Normality Guidance for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08531/) (2024)
- [Hawk: Learning to Understand Open-World Video Anomalies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16886/) (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)
- [Self-Distilled Masked Auto-Encoders are Efficient Video Anomaly Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12041/) (2023)
- [EventVAD: Training-Free Event-Aware Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13092/) (2025)
- [Towards Open Set Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11113/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [SphereVAD: Training-Free Video Anomaly Detection via Geodesic Inference on the Unit Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08003/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Open-World Video Anomaly Detection: Diagnosing Definition Blindness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20780/) (2026)
- [AGCD: Agent-Guided Cross-Modal Decoding for Weather Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15260/) (2026)
- [TAU-Agent: An Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Traffic Anomaly Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25935/) (2026)
- [NOVA: Normal-Side Modeling for Training-Free Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06360/) (2026)
- [Copy What Is Seen, Generate What Is Not: Training-Free Anomaly-Aware Video Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18836/) (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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The collection and detection of video anomaly data has long been a challenging problem due to its rare occurrence and spatio-temporal scarcity. Existing video anomaly detection (VAD) methods under perform in open-world scenarios. Key contributing factors include limited dataset diversity, and inadequate understanding of context-dependent anomalous semantics. To address these issues, i) we propose LAVIDA, an end-to-end zero-shot video anomaly detection framework. ii) LAVIDA employs an Anomaly Exposure Sampler that transforms segmented objects into pseudo-anomalies to enhance model adaptability to unseen anomaly categories. It further integrates a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to bolster semantic comprehension capabilities. Additionally, iii) we design a token compression approach based on reverse attention to handle the spatio-temporal scarcity of anomalous patterns and decrease computational cost. The training process is conducted solely on pseudo anomalies without any VAD data. Evaluations across four benchmark VAD datasets demonstrate that LAVIDA achieves SOTA performance in both frame-level and pixel-level anomaly detection under the zero-shot setting. Our code is available in https://github.com/VitaminCreed/LAVIDA.