# RoMod: Temporal Routing Modulation via Mixture-of-Experts for Video Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05131 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05131/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Vision mixture-of-experts, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- Builds on 28 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [Vision mixture-of-experts](https://mlsanity.com/moe/vision-mixture-of-experts/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [Understanding intermediate layers using linear classifier probes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01644/) (2016)
- [Probing Classifiers: Promises, Shortcomings, and Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12452/) (2021)
- [Discovering Latent Knowledge in Language Models Without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03827/) (2022)
- [Mixture-of-Experts with Expert Choice Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09368/) (2022)
- [Eliciting Latent Predictions from Transformers with the Tuned Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08112/) (2023)
- [Real-world Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04264/) (2018)
- [Weakly-supervised Video Anomaly Detection with Robust Temporal Feature Magnitude Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10030/) (2021)
- [VadCLIP: Adapting Vision-Language Models for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11681/) (2023)
- [Dual Memory Units with Uncertainty Regulation for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05160/) (2023)
- [EventVAD: Training-Free Event-Aware Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13092/) (2025)
- [PANDA: Towards Generalist Video Anomaly Detection via Agentic AI Engineer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26386/) (2025)
- [VADTree: Explainable Training-Free Video Anomaly Detection via Hierarchical Granularity-Aware Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22693/) (2025)
- [A Unified Reasoning Framework for Holistic Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00962/) (2025)
- [HiProbe-VAD: Video Anomaly Detection via Hidden States Probing in Tuning-Free Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17394/) (2025)
- [No Need For Real Anomaly: MLLM Empowered Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19248/) (2026)
- [RefineVAD: Semantic-Guided Feature Recalibration for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13204/) (2025)
- [HeadHunt-VAD: Hunting Robust Anomaly-Sensitive Heads in MLLM for Tuning-Free Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17601/) (2025)
- [Steering and Rectifying Latent Representation Manifolds in Frozen Multi-modal LLMs for Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.24021/) (2026)
- [Learning to Watch: Active Video Anomaly Understanding via Interleaved Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00622/) (2026)
- [Just Dance with π! A Poly-modal Inductor for Weakly-supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13123/) (2025)
- [Linguistic Relative Policy Optimization for Video Anomaly Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00654/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Intermediate-layer features from multimodal large language models have shown strong potential for video anomaly detection (VAD), yet the origin of their discriminative power remains unclear. We study this question using sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) models, whose explicit expert structure and sparse activation make their internal computation easier to inspect. With a fully frozen backbone and no additional training, we find that anomaly-related evidence is concentrated in a small set of experts. These experts recur across layers, spontaneously specialize in different anomaly types, and together form a dynamic routing subnetwork. We further show that the output channels most strongly influenced by these experts are also the hidden dimensions that contain the most anomaly-relevant information. Routing statistics can therefore serve as an internal anomaly cue that complements semantic features.Based on these findings, we propose RoMod, an efficient VAD framework trained with only (5%) of weakly labeled videos. RoMod includes a Routing-Modulated Fusion module, RoMF, and a Routing-aware Temporal Network, RoTN. RoMF uses routing signals to adaptively recalibrate hidden semantic channels. Its design also prevents the routing branch from bypassing semantic features and making predictions on its own. RoTN captures the temporal evolution of anomalies from onset to persistence and termination. Experiments on three benchmarks show that RoMod achieves state-of-the-art performance while running substantially faster than dense backbones of comparable size.
