cs.CVDec 7, 2025

PA-VAD: Diffusion-Based Pseudo-Only Video Anomaly Detection via Domain-Aligned Memory Updates

Authors: Satoshi HashimotoYanan WangHitoshi NishimuraMori Kurokawa

Organizations: KDDI Research, Inc., Fujimino, Saitama, Japan

Abstract

Deploying video anomaly detection (VAD) in the real world is often constrained by the scarcity, privacy, and cost of collecting real abnormal footage. We propose PA-VAD, a novel pseudo-only framework that trains an anomaly detector without using any real abnormal videos, by pairing real normal videos with diffusion-synthesized pseudo-abnormal videos generated from a small set of real normal images. Beyond proposing a generation-driven training pipeline, we make a key empirical discovery: pseudo anomalies exhibit a characteristic spatiotemporal magnitude bias in feature space, which can dominate Multiple Instance Learning and degrade generalization if left unaddressed. To counter this pseudo-induced bias, we introduce the Domain-Aligned Regularized Module (DARM), which combines domain alignment with usage-aware memory updates to balance prototype coverage and stabilize optimization under biased pseudo supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PA-VAD achieves 98.2% AUC on ShanghaiTech, 82.5% on UCF-Crime, and 95.1% on XD-Violence, and further improves generalization to unseen anomaly classes in open-set evaluations. Notably, PA-VAD surpasses the best real-abnormal WVAD baselines on ShanghaiTech and XD-Violence by +0.6% and +0.9%, respectively, and improves over the UVAD state of the art on UCF-Crime by +1.9% -showing that high-accuracy VAD is attainable without collecting real abnormal videos.

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