# AgenticVAU: Multi-Agent Explore-Verify Reasoning for Video Anomaly Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03779 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03779/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19348/) (2026)
- [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)
- [Future Frame Prediction for Anomaly Detection -- A New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09867/) (2017)
- [VideoAgent: Long-form Video Understanding with Large Language Model as Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10517/) (2024)
- [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)
- [VideoAgent: A Memory-augmented Multimodal Agent for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11481/) (2024)
- [Deep Video Discovery: Agentic Search with Tool Use for Long-form Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18079/) (2025)
- [Holmes-VAU: Towards Long-term Video Anomaly Understanding at Any Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06171/) (2024)
- [LVAgent: Long Video Understanding by Multi-Round Dynamical Collaboration of MLLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10200/) (2025)
- [Advancing Video Anomaly Detection: A Concise Review and a New Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04857/) (2024)
- [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)
- [VideoAgent2: Enhancing the LLM-Based Agent System for Long-Form Video Understanding by Uncertainty-Aware CoT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04471/) (2025)
- [VideoARM: Agentic Reasoning over Hierarchical Memory for Long-Form Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12360/) (2025)
- [LongVideoAgent: Multi-Agent Reasoning with Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20618/) (2025)
- [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)
- [VideoSeek: Long-Horizon Video Agent with Tool-Guided Seeking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20185/) (2026)
- [LensWalk: Agentic Video Understanding by Planning How You See in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24558/) (2026)
- [Learning to Watch: Active Video Anomaly Understanding via Interleaved Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00622/) (2026)
- [FineVAU: A Novel Human-Aligned Benchmark for Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17258/) (2026)

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

- [trACT: temporal revelation Airborne Camera Trap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09417/) (2026)
- [Anomaly-Guided Observation and Two-Level Semantic Feedback for Training-Free Video Anomaly Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16324/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video anomaly understanding (VAU) focuses on comprehensively interpreting abnormal events in videos, requiring models to identify anomalous occurrences, discover their supporting evidence, and explain the underlying causes beyond simple anomaly detection. Existing VAU methods often rely on specialized training or limited observations, restricting generalization or evidence coverage. Although single-agent alternatives support adaptive video observation, they still integrate exploration, observation, and decision-making within a unified reasoning process, offering limited role specialization and structured evidence coordination. To address these limitations, we present AgenticVAU, a training-free multi-agent framework that casts VAU as an explore--verify process, where the system first discovers potential anomalies and then verifies them through targeted observations. To achieve this, four specialized agents are introduced to handle visual-rule construction, search planning, video observation, and final decision, respectively. These agents communicate through an anchor registry, a shared evidence memory that binds each observation. Guided by this agent framework, AgenticVAU interleaves broad temporal exploration, dense local verification, and cross-interval comparison until sufficient evidence is collected. We conduct extensive experiments on the ECVA, UCF-Crime, and MSAD subsets of VAU-Bench, the results show that AgenticVAU outperforms zero-shot inference and reinforcement learning-based baselines, demonstrating the value of multi-agent collaboration for video anomaly understanding.