Probe-VAD: Ordinal Likelihood Probing for Training-Free Video Anomaly Detection
Authors: Jiawei Gu, Qilin Zhao, Tengkuo Guo, Zhiming Zhong, Shuangqing Zhang, Fan Lyu, Fang Zhao, Guo-Sen Xie, +1 more
Abstract
Video anomaly detection (VAD) aims to localize anomalous events in untrimmed videos. Vision-language models (VLMs) provide rich visual understanding for training-free VAD, but existing approaches impose restrictive interfaces between visual understanding and anomaly scoring. Caption-based pipelines compress visual evidence into text, potentially discarding subtle cues, while direct numerical generation forces the model to express its judgment through a small set of predefined scores. Such interfaces can obscure subtle differences in anomaly severity, causing visually distinct clips to receive similar representations or scores and thereby limiting the resolution of anomaly ranking. We propose \textbf{Probe-VAD}, an ordinal binary-probing framework that directly probes severity preferences from a frozen VLM. Given raw video clips, Probe-VAD queries ten ordered severity thresholds and extracts constrained \textit{YES}/\textit{NO} continuation likelihoods. Their normalized preferences form a cumulative severity profile, from which tail evidence is aggregated into a continuous anomaly score, with isotonic projection enforcing ordinal consistency. Experiments on public VAD benchmarks demonstrate superior performance with low computational cost. Probe-VAD provides a simple interface for translating frozen VLM visual understanding into continuous, rank-sensitive anomaly scores without task-specific training or caption-based compression. Code is available at: https://github.com/yvestine/COVAS-VAD.
Existing Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) methods typically rely on task-specific training, leading to strong domain dependency and high training costs. Moreover, most existing methods output only scalar anomaly scores, providing limited insight into why specific events are considered abnormal. Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled both anomaly detection and human-interpretable reasoning. However, many VLM-based approaches still require additional training steps (e.g., instruction tuning or verbalized learning) or external Large Language Models (LLMs), incurring further training costs and inference overhead. To address these challenges, we propose CoReVAD, a contextual reasoning framework for training-free video anomaly detection that operates with a single frozen VLM. CoReVAD directly generates anomaly scores and temporal descriptions from the VLM. To mitigate noise in generative outputs, we introduce a Local Response Cleaning (LRC) module based on local vision-text alignment. Furthermore, global temporal context and progression are incorporated through softmax-based refinement, Gaussian smoothing, and position weighting. Experiments on UCF-Crime and XD-Violence demonstrate that CoReVAD achieves competitive performance among training-free methods while providing reliable and interpretable explanations. Our official code is available at: https://github.com/Muk-00/CoReVAD
Video anomaly detection (VAD) aims to automatically identify events that deviate from normal patterns in untrimmed surveillance videos. Existing methods universally depend on large-scale annotations or task-specific training procedures, severely limiting their rapid deployment to novel scenes. We observe that intermediate-layer features of pre-trained multimodal large language models (MLLMs) already encode rich anomaly semantics, yet existing approaches rely on the language output pathway and fail to exploit the geometric discriminability latent in these representations. Based on this finding, we propose SphereVAD, a fully training-free, zero-shot VAD framework that recasts anomaly discrimination as von Mises-Fisher (vMF) likelihood-ratio geodesic inference on the unit hypersphere, unleashing latent discriminability through principled geometric reasoning rather than learning new representations. Specifically, SphereVAD first applies Frechet mean centering to unfold feature distributions and eliminate domain biases, then employs Holistic Scene Attention (HSA) to reinforce feature consistency using cross-video priors, and finally performs vMF-guided Spherical Geodesic Pulling (SGP) to align ambiguous segments with directional prototypes on the spherical manifold. This training-free pipeline requires only minimal synthetic images for calibration. SphereVAD establishes new state-of-the-art results among training-free approaches on three major benchmarks and remains competitive with fully supervised baselines. Code will be available upon acceptance.
Visual data is typically a prerequisite for training existing video anomaly detection (VAD) methods. However, obtaining sufficient annotated anomaly data for training is challenging and not scalable due to the rarity of anomaly data and the wide variety of abnormal events. In this work, we advocate that the effectiveness of treating texts as video sequences for the VAD model and propose a novel Text-Driven Video Anomaly Detection (TD-VAD) approach to break visual dependence. In contrast to the anomaly video data, text descriptions of abnormal events are easy to collect, and their class labels can be directly derived. Specifically, our method utilizes video-like text descriptions with temporal characteristics generated by LLM to train a VAD model, without any reliance on target-domain anomaly data. To capture the long- and short-range temporal logic of events, we design the event evolution causal attention module to model contextual dependencies across time. During inference, considering the domain gap between the texts and video sequences, we use the frozen CLIP encoder to extract embeddings of video frames to align the text modality while retaining crucial visual information. Comprehensive experiments on two large-scale VAD datasets, XD-Violence and UCF-Crime, demonstrate that our method outperforms prior one-class and unsupervised VAD methods by a large margin.