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.
In this paper, we propose MuST-VAD, a mutual structured learning framework for weakly supervised video anomaly detection (VAD) in which an anomaly detector and a large vision-language model (LVLM) exchange their acquired knowledge. Detectors in weakly supervised VAD learn anomaly scores from features extracted by a fixed, task-agnostic backbone. These fixed features bound the achievable detection accuracy. Recent methods therefore transfer LVLM semantics into the detector as richer features. However, this transfer is one-way: what the detector learns about the target videos never returns to the LVLM. MuST-VAD extends the one-way transfer into a bidirectional learning loop. In this loop, the latest detector predictions supervise the LVLM adaptation, and the adapted LVLM returns updated representations that retrain the detector; the two models alternate these updates over small video groups. Both models train on detector-selected key clips, while confidence weighting and annotation-anchored question answering keep the exchanged supervision reliable. On UCF-Crime, our mutual learning improves the one-pass transfer baseline from 88.15% to 88.63% AUROC and from 37.25% to 42.46% average precision (AP), outperforming the state-of-the-art method in AP by 4.13 points.
Satoshi Hashimoto, Hitoshi Nishimura, Mori Kurokawa
In this paper, we explore a weakly supervised method for anomaly detection. Since annotating videos is time-consuming, we only look at weak video-level labels during training. This means that given a video, we know that it is either normal or contains an anomaly, but no further annotations are used to train the network. Features are extracted from video clips that are either normal or anomalous. These features are used to determine anomaly scores for spatiotemporal regions of the clips based on a classifier and the implementation of a multiple instance ranking loss (MIL). We represent both anomalous and normal video clips as positive and negative bags, respectively, to apply MIL. Furthermore, since anomalies are usually localized to a part of a frame rather than the whole frame, we chose to explore temporal as well as spatial anomaly detection. We show our results on the UCF Crime2Local Dataset, which contains spatiotemporal annotations for a portion of the UCF Crime Dataset.
Urvi Gianchandani, Praveen Tirupattur, Mubarak Shah
Weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WSVAD) has predominantly focused on temporal localization, identifying when anomalies occur while largely neglecting their spatial extent within frames. Yet, spatial localization is essential for interpretability and practical deployment in real-world settings. We introduce a patch-based spatiotemporal framework for weakly supervised anomaly localization that jointly models where and when anomalies occur. Our approach operates on grid-level patch features and learns region-level anomaly scores under a multiple instance learning paradigm. We further propose a Proximity-Aware Top-k spatiotemporal selection strategy that enables the model to generate fine-grained spatial anomaly maps without requiring bounding-box supervision during training. Our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches across multiple benchmarks, yielding substantial gains in spatiotemporal localization accuracy. In addition, we release frame-level bounding-box annotations for the test sets of two widely used datasets, along with our code and pretrained models, providing new resources to facilitate future research in spatially grounded WSVAD.