Weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WS-VAD) involves identifying the temporal intervals that contain anomalous events in untrimmed videos, where only video-level annotations are provided as supervisory signals. However, a key limitation persists in WS-VAD, as dense frame-level annotations are absent, which often leaves existing methods struggling to learn anomaly semantics effectively. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework named LAS-VAD, short for Learning Anomaly Semantics for WS-VAD, which integrates anomaly-connected component mechanism and intention awareness mechanism. The former is designed to assign video frames into distinct semantic groups within a video, and frame segments within the same group are deemed to share identical semantic information. The latter leverages an intention-aware strategy to distinguish between similar normal and abnormal behaviors (e.g., taking items and stealing). To further model the semantic information of anomalies, as anomaly occurrence is accompanied by distinct characteristic attributes (i.e., explosions are characterized by flames and thick smoke), we additionally incorporate anomaly attribute information to guide accurate detection. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, XD-Violence and UCF-Crime, demonstrate that our LAS-VAD outperforms current state-of-the-art methods with remarkable gains.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of the proposed LAS-VAD. We integrate an intention awareness mechanism and anomaly-connected component mechanism into WS-VAD to learn object intentions and more discriminative semantics. Additionally, attribute information of anomaly categories is introduced to facilitate accurate anomaly detection.
Supervision
Modality
Methods
Feature
AP(%)
Unsupervised
RGB+Audio
LTR [ 10 ]
I3D+VGGish
30.77
Weakly Supervised
RGB+Audio
CTRFD [ 51 ]
I3D+VGGish
75.90
WS-AVVD [ 52 ]
I3D+VGGish
78.64
ECU [ 62 ]
I3D+VGGish
81.43
DMU [ 68 ]
I3D+VGGish
81.77
MACIL-SD [ 58 ]
I3D+VGGish
83.40
Table 1: Coarse-grained comparisons on XD-Violence.
Supervision
Methods
Feature
AUC(%)
Unsupervised
LTR [ 10 ]
I3D+VGGish
50.60
GODS [ 43 ]
I3D
70.46
GCL [ 59 ]
I3D
71.04
Weakly Supervised
TCN-CIBL [ 63 ]
C3D
78.66
GCN-Anomaly [ 66 ]
C3D
81.08
GLAWS [ 60 ]
C3D
83.03
Table 2: Coarse-grained comparisons on UCF-Crime.
Methods
mAP@IoU
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
AVG
RAD [ 39 ]
22.72
15.57
9.98
6.20
3.78
11.65
AVVD [ 52 ]
30.51
25.75
20.18
14.83
9.79
20.21
VadCLIP [ 55 ]
37.03
30.84
23.38
17.90
14.31
24.70
ITC [ 22 ]
40.83
32.80
25.42
19.65
15.47
26.83
ReFLIP [ 7 ]
39.24
33.45
27.71
20.86
17.22
27.36
Table 3: Fine-grained comparisons on XD-Violence.
Methods
mAP@IoU
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
AVG
RAD [ 39 ]
5.73
4.41
2.69
1.93
1.44
3.24
AVVD [ 52 ]
10.27
7.01
6.25
3.42
3.29
6.05
VadCLIP [ 55 ]
11.72
7.83
6.40
4.53
2.93
6.68
ITC [ 22 ]
13.54
9.24
7.45
5.46
3.79
7.90
ReFLIP [ 7 ]
14.23
10.34
9.32
7.54
6.81
9.62
Table 4: Fine-grained comparisons on UCF-Crime.
Table 5: Ablation Studies on XD-Violence. “IAM” denotes the intention awareness module, “ACC” denotes the anomaly-connected components, and “AAT” denotes anomaly attribute clues.
Figure 2: Ablation study on the utility of ACC.
Figure 3: Fine-grained predictions w/ and w/o the proposed IAM.
LLM
mAP@IoU
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
AVG
Lamma3
50.03
44.04
35.87
29.53
24.58
36.81
Qwen2
50.09
44.04
35.91
29.46
24.57
36.81
Gemini2.5
50.14
44.11
35.94
29.49
24.59
36.85
DeepSeek V3
50.15
44.08
35.97
29.47
24.61
36.86
GPT4
50.18
44.09
36.00
29.51
24.65
36.89
Table 6: Different LLMs are tested on XD-Violence.
Figure 4: Visualization of representations for different categories in (a), (b), and (c). (d) shows the utility of rectification mechanism.
Weakly supervised video anomaly detection relies solely on video-level labels for training, making it difficult to accurately localize anomalous events in complex scenes. In real-world videos, anomalous behaviors exhibit large variations in appearance and temporal duration, while scene appearance and action dynamics are often tightly entangled. Consequently, existing models tend to rely on scene-related statistical cues rather than true behavioral deviations, resulting in unstable detection performance. To address this challenge, we propose a Structured Evidence Selection framework (SESAD) that reformulates anomaly detection as a structured reasoning process over clip-level visual evidence. Instead of directly mapping aggregated features to anomaly scores, SESAD reorganizes clip representations into semantically structured candidate evidence and performs context-conditioned selection under scene and action constraints. This mechanism adaptively emphasizes anomaly-relevant semantics while suppressing scene interference, thereby alleviating semantic entanglement under weak supervision. Furthermore, we introduce a lightweight geometric discrimination module that constructs a dual-prototype structure in the embedding space, enabling anomaly decisions through relative geometric relations. Extensive experiments on UBnormal, ShanghaiTech, and UCF-Crime show that SESAD achieves 67.92, 97.99, and 88.46 AUC, respectively, while maintaining high computational efficiency and overall consistently stable anomaly discrimination.
Chenglizhao Chen, Tianxiang Nan, Wen Li +4
China University of Petroleum (East China) Qingdao, China
Weakly supervised video anomaly detection aims to detect anomalies and identify abnormal categories with only video-level labels. We propose CPL-VAD, a dual-branch framework with cross pseudo labeling. The binary anomaly detection branch focuses on snippet-level anomaly localization, while the category classification branch leverages vision-language alignment to recognize abnormal event categories. By exchanging pseudo labels, the two branches transfer complementary strengths, combining temporal precision with semantic discrimination. Experiments on XD-Violence and UCF-Crime demonstrate that CPL-VAD achieves state-of-the-art performance in both anomaly detection and abnormal category classification.
Dayeon Lee, Donghyeong Kim, Chaewon Park +2
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea · Samsung Electronics, Suwon, Korea
Recent weakly supervised video anomaly detection methods have achieved significant advances by employing unified frameworks for joint optimization. However, this paradigm is limited by a fundamental sensitivity-stability trade-off, as the conflicting objectives for detecting transient and sustained anomalies lead to either fragmented predictions or over-smoothed responses. To address this limitation, we propose DeSC, a novel Decoupled Sensitivity-Consistency framework that trains two specialized streams using distinct optimization strategies. The temporal sensitivity stream adopts an aggressive optimization strategy to capture high-frequency abrupt changes, whereas the semantic consistency stream applies robust constraints to maintain long-term coherence and reduce noise. Their complementary strengths are fused through a collaborative inference mechanism that reduces individual biases and produces balanced predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeSC establishes new state-of-the-art performance by achieving 89.37% AUC on UCF-Crime (+1.29%) and 87.18% AP on XD-Violence (+2.22%). Code is available at https://github.com/imzht/DeSC.
Hantao Zheng, Ning Han, Yawen Zeng +1
School of Computer Science, Hunan University, China · School of Computer Science, Xiangtan University, China