Scene Bias

SceneHI is a framework that lifts high-resolution, illumination-aware priors from 2D diffusion models to perform 3D texture synthesis. It is the first to demonstrate that high-resolution textures, previously limited to 2D synthesis, can be generated directly on 3D objects without model fine-tuning or optimization. Designed for complex, multi-object environments, SceneHI uniquely combines 3D-consistency, high-resolution fidelity, and physically plausible baked shadows within a single generative pipeline. To enforce strict geometric coherence, we introduce an exact analytical pixel-to-texel mapping that aligns diffusion trajectories across multiple viewpoints. We utilize High-Resolution Latent Textures (HRLTs) as a persistent canvas for gradually denoised textures, while camera views perform the denoising steps in latent pixel space. This ensures a shared base texture that can be subsequently refined to high resolution without compromising multi-view consistency. Finally, a light-aware generative pass embeds realistic geometry-consistent shadows directly into the atlases, bridging the gap to production workflows. SceneHI achieves high visual fidelity while reducing generation time by 80% compared to existing scene-level methods.

Two-stage vision pipelines often place an enhancement network before a task network, on the assumption that a cleaner input produces a better output. We evaluate this in a firefighter assistance pipeline, where a dehazer precedes an edge detector that renders smoke-filled rooms as structural outlines. Both were designed for a Raspberry Pi 4, at 355K and 23K parameters, and quantized to UINT8 via TensorFlow Lite. The float dehazer reaches 18.60 dB peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) on held-out real smoke against 13.60 dB unprocessed and 17.08 dB for an AOD-Net trained on the same data, and the edge detector reaches an F-measure at optimal dataset scale (ODS) of 0.738, outperforming an optimized Canny's result of 0.692. Dehazing improves edge extraction under dense smoke but degrades it on clear and lightly hazed frames, where the dehazer discards more detail than the haze obscures. We therefore run the dehazer only when a dark channel haze estimate exceeds a threshold, a 10.1 ms test that lets the pipeline save 469.6 ms on the dehazing stage. Averaged over four haze levels, gating is more accurate than either fixed decision, at 0.675 mean ODS against 0.664 for always dehazing and 0.630 for never dehazing. It reduces the mean per-frame time on the Raspberry Pi from 569 ms to 321 ms, and on clear frames increases the frame rate fivefold, from 1.8 to 9 frames per second.

Despite growing interest in weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WSVAD), current methods struggle to bridge the gap between coarse temporal supervision and fine-grained spatial reasoning. A key obstacle is the tendency of temporal detectors to latch onto background and scene-level cues rather than truly discriminative anomaly evidence. This background bias raises ethical concerns: models may inadvertently associate anomalies with societal or environmental context rather than authentic crime-related cues. Without spatial grounding, such biases remain hidden and unauditable. To address this, we propose SST-WSVADL, a sparse spatio-temporal framework that bridges temporal anomaly detection with fine-grained spatial localization. Rather than processing all spatial regions indiscriminately, SST-WSVADL progressively focuses on the most anomaly-relevant spatio-temporal regions through dynamic sparsification, naturally suppressing background dominant content while preserving discriminative evidence. The temporal and spatial branches are coupled end-to-end via motion-aware regularization that guides sparsification toward dynamically informative regions, without relying on external detectors or vision-language prompts. We publicly release frame-level spatial annotations and a method-agnostic evaluation protocol for three public datasets: UCF-Crime, XD-Violence, and MSAD. These resources enable the community to audit spatial biases in WSVAD predictions, supporting progress toward more ethical and accountable anomaly detection. Experiments demonstrate that SST-WSVADL is competitive with prior methods across benchmarks while enabling localization and patch-level auditability of scene bias, providing a reproducible foundation for interpretability-oriented evaluation of WSVAD models.

Existing diffusion-based methods have recently made significant progress in image dehazing. However, they typically neglect the physics of haze formation and reconstruct clean images from pure Gaussian noise, thereby limiting their restoration potential. To address this issue, we propose Haze-Noise Diffusion (HNDiff), a novel diffusion framework that embeds the atmospheric scattering model as an inductive bias. By grounding diffusion in physical principles, HNDiff ensures that the restoration aligns more closely with underlying mechanisms of haze formation. In its forward process, we introduce joint haze-noise diffusion with a haze-aware noise scheduler, which progressively adds both haze and noise to an image. Essentially, the scheduler adapts noise levels according to haze density, meaning that regions with heavier haze receive stronger noise injection to encourage content generation, while clearer regions receive lighter noise to better preserve details, which directly links the forward degradation process with the physics of haze. In the reverse process, we then derive a physically consistent dehazing-denoising process that simultaneously removes haze and noise to restore a clean image in a manner aligned with the forward degradation process. To further enhance practicality, we propose Latent HNDiff, which compiles clean latent priors that can be seamlessly integrated into existing dehazing networks to boost performance. Extensive experiments show that our work significantly improves leading dehazing backbones and achieves state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets. The project page is available at https://jin-ting-he.github.io/HNDiff .

Dehazing networks are commonly trained on synthetic hazy-clear pairs, but their performance often drops on real photographs. Synthetic haze generated using the atmospheric scattering model does not fully capture the variability of real haze, and paired real hazy-clear images are scarce. In this work, we propose HazeSpikeMamba, a compact dehazing framework that combines a spiking-inspired local path and an attentive state-space global path in a multi-scale U-Net. The local path uses TPCNNSpike, a new spike-emission scheme inspired by the neighborhood coupling of Pulse-Coupled Neural Network (PCNN). Unlike grouped directional scanning, TPCNNSpike updates all neurons in parallel using the previous firing states of their Gaussian-weighted neighborhoods. The global path adapts the Attentive State-Space Module of MambaIRv2, retaining semantic prompting and sequence reordering while removing the window self-attention branch. Its state-space processing models long-range dependencies with complexity linear in sequence length. For target-domain adaptation, a frozen degradation network, pretrained on paired NH-HAZE data, re-synthesizes haze from the dehazed prediction. The reconstruction error updates only the final restoration layers of HazeSpikeMamba without haze-free labels during adaptation. A shared checkpoint is adapted once on each complete unlabeled target set, making the evaluation dataset-level and transductive rather than zero-shot or per-image optimization. The forward network contains 2.02M active parameters and requires 13.27G nominal MACs (measured with thop at 256x256 input). This adaptation consistently improves BRISQUE and NIMA on RTTS, URHI, and HSTS. On RTTS, BRISQUE decreases from 30.13 to 27.72 and NIMA increases from 4.13 to 4.87. Under this transductive protocol, the adapted model also achieves the best BRISQUE and NIMA on URHI and HSTS among the compared methods.

Although image deraining has advanced substantially, existing methods mainly focus on 2D image restoration. As spatial intelligence applications such as embodied AI and autonomous driving continue to emerge, reconstructing clean 3D scenes from sparse rainy views in a feed-forward manner becomes increasingly important. Existing feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods often assume clean inputs and collapse under rainy conditions. To this end, we present \textbf{\textit{DerainSplat}}, a feed-forward framework that reconstructs clean 3D scenes from only a few rainy views. To support this task, we build a large-scale multi-view derain dataset through a four-stage synthesis pipeline that sequentially models overcast illumination, depth-dependent haze, rain streaks, and lens raindrops, producing privileged weather factors. We introduce a weather net that predicts the weather factors from rainy context and yields two support maps. Scene support modulates cross-view cost-volume matching, while radiance support drives depth-aligned appearance fusion to fill corrupted pixels. The derived geometry evidence further attenuates Gaussian opacity to reduce spurious structures. A rainy cycle consistency re-renders clean views using the predicted factors and aligns them with rainy inputs. Extensive experiments show that \textbf{\textit{DerainSplat}} outperforms existing methods on various datasets, including RealEstate10K, ACID, Mip-NeRF360, and real-world rainy scenes, with strong cross-dataset generalization.

Single-image dehazing aims to recover a clear scene from a hazy image and is generally formulated as an image-to-image translation task; however, it faces two limitations. Its performance depends heavily on the haze-formation priors embedded in the model. Prevailing methods adopt the Atmospheric Scattering Model (ASM), whose assumptions of single scattering and homogeneous media are often violated, leading to residual haze and color drift. Moreover, large-scale real hazy/clear pairs are impractical to collect, and existing synthesis approaches fail to reproduce the full complexity of natural haze. To address these issues, we present RTE-FM-Dehazer, a novel dehazing approach, together with a scalable data pipeline. Unlike the ASM, the Radiative Transfer Equation (RTE) jointly accounts for both scattering and absorption, naturally accommodating the non-homogeneous, multiple-scattering media that characterize real hazy scenes. Motivated by the structural similarity between the RTE diffusion-absorption term and the ODE in flow matching, we introduce a diffusion-absorption regularizer derived from a reduced RTE, to steer the flow matching trajectory at each step. Next, leveraging modern vision-language models, we build an automated pipeline and release P-HAZE, a dataset of 50000 realistic hazy/clear pairs. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that RTE-FM-Dehazer, trained solely on P-HAZE, effectively eliminates artifacts like residual haze and color drift, exhibits strong cross-domain generalization, and achieves leading results on five real-world dehazing benchmarks.

We study the problem of physically plausible shadow casting when animating 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) avatars, either individually or in multi-avatar and object-interaction scenarios, within existing 3DGS scenes. In contrast to prior methods that rely on binary hit tests and mesh-based shadow casters, our method performs shadow computation entirely in Gaussian space, without requiring any mesh reconstruction. We introduce RAGA, a Ray-Traced Gaussian Shadow Casting formulation based on exact ray-Gaussian line integrals. For each occluding Gaussian, we integrate the opacity profile along the shadow ray and normalize by the theoretical maximum integral, producing a weight that captures how the ray traverses the occluder rather than merely whether an intersection occurred. To reduce temporal variance from clothing deformations in animated avatars, we further introduce an avatar proxy representation that stabilizes shadow casting while preserving visual fidelity. We implement RAGA using custom CUDA kernels integrated with the NVIDIA OptiX framework; as such, our shadow tracer runs at rates of about 50 FPS. We evaluate on single-avatar, multi-avatar, and avatar-object interaction scenarios across multiple datasets, demonstrating substantially improved shadow realism, temporal stability, and scene coherence. Our project page is available at https://miraymen.github.io/raga/.

Recent work on neural texture compression has demonstrated that it is possible to learn small, per-material texture representations (composed of latent textures and a small Multi-Layer Perceptron decoder) that can be decoded in real-time during shading to reproduce the input to a physically based shading model. However, existing methods require performing gradient-descent optimization per material for a given MLP and latent configuration. In this work, we train a single hypernetwork that outputs both the latent features and the MLP's weights and biases. Though the solution space is high-dimensional, this approach produces results comparable in quality to the current reference neural texture compressors. We further extend this approach to infer multiple decoders at once or even produce decoders that learn super-resolution.

Recent advances in 3D mesh generation have enabled the creation of visually realistic assets. However, much of their visual fidelity is encoded in textures rather than geometry. When such assets are fabricated using monochromatic materials, texture information is largely lost, causing visually important details to disappear even when the original geometry is faithfully preserved. A key challenge is that the geometric perturbations required to recover texture-dependent appearance cues often introduce sharp local features and high-frequency surface structures, which may increase stress concentration and fabrication risk. In this paper, we present GenMF, an appearance-oriented geometry refinement framework for monochromatic fabrication. GenMF transforms texture-dependent visual cues into geometry-induced shading effects and formulates geometry refinement as a balance between appearance preservation and fabrication-oriented robustness. To discourage structurally and narrow the gap between simulation and physical manufacturing, we further introduce a differentiable stress-aware regularization based on a learned thermal-stress predictor. Experimental results demonstrate that GenMF significantly improves appearance preservation under monochromatic rendering while reducing stress concentration under a consistent thermo-mechanical simulation setting. Physical 3D printing examples further show that the refined geometries preserve more recognizable visual details while remaining suitable for fabrication. These results suggest that appearance-aware geometry refinement provides an effective bridge between generated 3D assets and fabrication-ready monochromatic objects.

How much of my data was used to train a machine learning model? Dataset Usage Inference (DUI) aims to answer this by estimating what fraction of a dataset contributed to a model's training. However, existing DUI methods rely on assumptions that rarely hold in practice: they require training expensive shadow models to imitate the target model, and they assume access to both known training samples and an in-distribution held-out set confirmed to be absent from training. These conditions make current approaches impractical for modern large models and real data ownership disputes. We introduce a practical DUI framework that removes these constraints. Our method requires neither shadow models nor real held-out data. Instead, it generates synthetic non-member samples, extracts diverse membership signals, and casts DUI as a mixture proportion estimation problem to estimate what share of the candidate dataset was used during training. Experiments on large image generative models show that our method reliably quantifies dataset usage, providing a practical tool for data owners to determine how much of their data was used to train a model.

Adversarial camouflage in the physical world remains highly challenging, particularly under UAV reconnaissance where targets undergo continuous geometric changes and extreme illumination variations. Existing methods either optimize 2D digital perturbations that fail to generalize to dynamic viewpoints or produce visually unnatural textures that cannot be deployed in real scenarios. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end framework for adversarial camouflage generation that automatically produces wearable adversarial patterns and maintains stable attack performance in real physical environments with changing viewpoints, poses, and lighting conditions. Our method integrates UV-volume rendering with a diffusion-based texture generator, enabling consistent appearance under varying scales, poses, and lighting conditions. To ensure environmental realism, we propose an illumination color consistency estimator that extracts dominant background attributes and guides a natural texture loss to align the generated UV texture with the surrounding environment. A multi-scale dynamic training strategy further enhances robustness against viewpoint shifts and body deformation. Extensive experiments across multiple mainstream detectors demonstrate that our method achieves strong and stable physical attack performance while maintaining high perceptual naturalness, reducing human detection rates without introducing unnatural artifacts.

In UAV applications, haze significantly obscures distant details and weaken structural information, hindering the recovery of details. Current UAV scenarios still face two key challenges: (i) paired hazy/clean images from the real world are unobtainable, while the classical atmospheric scattering model is inadequate for modeling the spatially non-uniform haze in UAV imagery; (ii) existing dehazing methods struggle to remove the heavy haze accumulated in the upper regions of UAV images. To address these issues, we first propose a UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model (UASM), which explicitly incorporates flight altitude, viewing pitch, and extinction to characterize the non-uniform haze distribution in UAV imaging. Based on UASM, we develop a physics-driven dehazing framework, termed Geometry-aware Proximal Deep Unfolding Network (GP-DUN). Specifically, GP-DUN consists of three key modules: a Latent Geometry Estimator (LGE) that infers transmittance consistent with UAV imaging geometry, a Geometry-aware Gradient Descent Module (GeoGDM) that embeds UASM into the data-fidelity term and performs physics-consistent closed-form updates, and an Pooling-Expert Proximal Mapping Module (PE-PMM) that learns an implicit prior to restore textures and structures beyond the capability of explicit physical modeling. In addition, we further construct UASM-HazeSet, which provides controllable paired synthetic data together with 2,285 real UAV haze images for testing. Extensive experiments show that GP-DUN consistently outperforms existing methods on both UASM-HazeSet and real UAV haze benchmarks.

Existing single image dehazing methods are often constrained by computational redundancy in pixel-level optimization and the lack of physical interpretability in implicit neural networks. These limitations hinder the balance between representation efficiency and reconstruction fidelity. To address these issues, we propose Dehaze-GaussianImage, the first zero-shot framework that introduces 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) into the image dehazing domain to break the traditional pixel-grid processing paradigm. Distinct from static convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or Transformers, our approach models hazy images as continuous and dynamically evolvable anisotropic Gaussian fields. Specifically, we propose a novel reconstruction-decoupling zero-shot learning strategy that embeds the atmospheric scattering model into the Gaussian parameter space. This strategy drives Gaussian primitives to adaptively split, clone, and prune during optimization, achieving geometric-level decoupling of the transmission medium and clear textures. Furthermore, explicit structure-preserving constraints are introduced to suppress artifacts commonly caused by traditional physical priors. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in a fully unsupervised manner with minimal parameters, highlighting the potential of explicit Gaussian representation for low-level vision tasks.

Advances in novel materials science enable structures to function as intelligent machines by embedding memory and learning capabilities directly into materials. Our work introduces a physical adaptive material motor unit neural network,leveraging a new generation of controllable actuators composed of wood- and carbon black-based composites, sensitive to temperature and relative humidity. These material actuators are assembled into a motor unit-like structure inspired by muscle contraction trigger, forming an intelligent machine capable of dynamic shading control that can be used, for example, in buildings. The machine is governed by a neural network trained on over 350 experimental data points collected under diverse environmental conditions. By establishing a new data-aware backpropagation training, we show that the machine predicts shading responses and learns to predict appropriate behaviour incrementally as the database expands. We also demonstrate the ability of the machine to optimise configurations to achieve similar shading outputs under two distinct conditions.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) renders new views of a scene in real time. Like every rasterizer, it answers only primary rays, the rays from the camera through the image. It cannot trace the secondary rays that shadows, ambient occlusion, and global illumination need. We turn a trained 3DGS scene into a ray oracle by distilling a Directed Distance Function (DDF). The DDF is a small neural field. It takes a ray, given by an origin and a direction, and returns the distance to the first surface and whether the ray hits anything. Each query is one forward pass. The field is 52MB, and its size does not depend on the number of Gaussians, so its cost and memory stay flat as the scene grows. We make three points. First, we study what supervision a DDF needs. Depth rendered from the Gaussians is too blurry to teach thin parts, while clean distance supervision recovers them. Second, we measure speed. The DDF is 26 to 72 times faster than sphere tracing an equivalent signed distance field, and unlike a bounding volume hierarchy built over the Gaussians, even on dedicated RT-core hardware, its query time and memory do not grow with the scene. Third, we show a pipeline that needs no mesh: images give a 3DGS scene, a neural surface gives clean distances, and the DDF learns from them. We use the DDF as a secondary-ray oracle for global illumination. It reproduces reference ray-traced shadows at 30.3dB and ambient occlusion at 21.3~dB across 142 objects, and on real captured scenes. Our codes are available at https://github.com/smlab-niser/ddf-gs.

Urban heat exposure is becoming an increasingly critical challenge due to the intensifying urban heat island effect. Fine-grained shade patterns, especially those induced by urban buildings, strongly influence pedestrians' thermal exposure and outdoor activity planning. However, accurately modeling and analyzing urban shade at scale remains difficult because of the lack of large-scale datasets and systematic evaluation frameworks. To address this challenge, we present ShadeBench, a comprehensive dataset and benchmark for urban shade understanding. ShadeBench contains geographically diverse urban scenes with temporally varying simulated shade maps and textual descriptions, together with aligned satellite imagery, building skeleton representations, and 3D building meshes. Built upon this multimodal dataset, ShadeBench supports a range of downstream tasks, including shade generation, shade segmentation, and 3D building reconstruction. We further establish standardized evaluation protocols and baseline methods for these tasks. By enabling scalable and fine-grained shade analysis, ShadeBench provides a foundation for data-driven urban climate research and supports future studies in heat-resilient urban planning and decision-making. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://darl-genai.github.io/shadebench/.

Stereoscopic 3D displays adopt a binocular depth cue to provide depth perception. However, users should be equipped with expensive special devices to appreciate depth perception based on the binocular depth cues. Also, visual fatigue induced by the stereoscopic display is still a challenging open problem. In order to overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a novel framework, JSM, to enhance monocular depth perception, significantly improving both depth volume perception and depth range perception. The proposed framework can not only provide an enhanced depth perception on any conventional 2D display devices, but also it can be applicable to the 3D display devices since it is complementary to binocular depth cues. The qualitative evaluation, ablation study, and subjective user evaluation proved the advantages and practicability of the proposed framework.

In real-world scenarios, image defogging is an inverse problem due to unknown scene depth, atmospheric scattering, and the common absence of ground truth . To resolve the issue, we propose a hybrid defogging model that integrates a fourth-order nonlinear PDE with a physical haze formation model. We used Dark Channel Prior to estimate atmospheric parameters and to generate a guidance image, while the final restoration is performed via a fourth-order PDE-based evolution. A fourth-order PDE of the type telegraph is then evolved, incorporating an edge-adaptive diffusion coefficient and a fidelity term weighted by the transmission map. Fourth-order diffusion effectively suppresses haze while preserving structural details, and the hyperbolic formulation improves numerical stability and convergence behavior. We use relative error norm criteria for the convergence of our PDE. The proposed method is compared with Dark Channel prior, modified Dark Channel prior, and variational-based single-image defogging techniques. When we have ground truth available, we use MSE and SSIM for quantitative evaluation, whereas no-reference metrics, including FADE, Contrast Restoration Index, Average Gradient, and Entropy, are applied to real-world foggy images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid PDE-based method provides comparable visual quality and maintains structural details.

We introduce Soft Anisotropic Diagrams (SAD), an explicit and differentiable image representation parameterized by a set of adaptive sites in the image plane. In SAD, each site specifies an anisotropic metric and an additively weighted distance score, and we compute pixel colors as a softmax blend over a small per-pixel top-K subset of sites. We induce a soft anisotropic additively weighted Voronoi partition (i.e., an Apollonius diagram) with learnable per-site temperatures, preserving informative gradients while allowing clear, content-aligned boundaries and explicit ownership. Such a formulation enables efficient rendering by maintaining a per-query top-K map that approximates nearest neighbors under the same shading score, allowing GPU-friendly, fixed-size local computation. We update this list using our top-K propagation scheme inspired by jump flooding, augmented with stochastic injection to provide probabilistic global coverage. Training follows a GPU-first pipeline with gradient-weighted initialization, Adam optimization, and adaptive budget control through densification and pruning. Across standard benchmarks, SAD consistently outperforms Image-GS and Instant-NGP at matched bitrate. On Kodak, SAD reaches 46.0 dB PSNR with 2.2 s encoding time (vs. 28 s for Image-GS), and delivers 4-19 times end-to-end training speedups over state-of-the-art baselines. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SAD by showcasing the seamless integration with differentiable pipelines for forward and inverse problems, efficiency of fast random access, and compact storage.

This study presents a Shape from Shading (SfS) framework to enhance sub-metre resolution lunar digital elevation models (DEMs) using imagery from the Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) aboard Chandrayaan-2. The framework applies SfS to an independent OHRC image of the same region, enabling SfS not just as a refinement tool, but as a source of new topographic data, unconstrained by stereo baseline limitations. The method is applied across three lunar sites, including the Cyrillus crater, the Vikram landing region, and the lunar south pole (Mons Mouton), with a systematic three-stage parameter sweep on the SfS smoothness weight. Results show measurable topographic enhancement, particularly in surface slope statistics, revealing fine-scale crater morphology previously unresolved. A limiting case is also characterized, where large pitch angle separation between the shading image and stereo pair reduces SfS sensitivity, and partial footprint coverage of the shading image is identified as a factor influencing spatially variable enhancement quality.

Shadows are prevalent in high-resolution aerospace imagery (ASI). They often cause spectral distortion and information loss, which degrade downstream interpretation tasks. While deep learning methods have advanced natural-image shadow removal, their direct application to ASI faces two primary challenges. First, strictly paired training data are severely lacking. Second, homogeneous shadow assumptions fail to handle the broad penumbra transition zones inherent in aerospace scenes. To address these issues, we propose AeroDeshadow, a unified two-stage framework integrating physics-guided shadow synthesis and penumbra-aware restoration. In the first stage, a Physics-aware Degradation Shadow Synthesis Network (PDSS-Net) explicitly models illumination decay and spatial attenuation. This process constructs AeroDS-Syn, a large-scale paired dataset featuring soft boundary transitions. Constrained by this physical formulation, a Penumbra-aware Cascaded DeShadowing Network (PCDS-Net) then decouples the input into umbra and penumbra components. By restoring these regions progressively, PCDS-Net alleviates boundary artifacts and over-correction. Trained solely on the synthetic AeroDS-Syn, the network generalizes to real-world ASI without requiring paired real annotations. Experimental results indicate that AeroDeshadow achieves state-of-the-art quantitative accuracy and visual fidelity across synthetic and real-world datasets. The datasets and code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/AeroVILab-AHU/AeroDeshadow.

Frame-level area under the ROC curve (AUC) is the dominant evaluation metric for weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WSVAD). Its standard form measures whether an anomalous frame outranks a normal frame drawn from anywhere in the test set. We refer to this comparison as pooled AUC, since it aggregates frame pairs across test videos regardless of source. Pooled AUC therefore credits both event localization and differences between video sources. We audit this protocol on UCF-Crime across recent state-of-the-art models spanning different backbone families. Holding each model's frame scores fixed, we read them under three pairing granularities: global, per anomaly category, and within each video, then repeat the same three-granularity readout on zero-shot scores computed from the models' internal representations. We assess ranking reliability with a paired video bootstrap. Three findings follow. First, pooled AUC does not reliably predict within-video anomaly localization: models with similar pooled scores exhibit large localization differences and rank reversals under stricter granularities. Second, at the benchmark's test-split size, pooled AUC lacks the resolution to support state-of-the-art margins reported in the field. Within each backbone family, it resolves no comparison at those margins, while within-video AUC resolves several over identical predictions. Learned representations further reveal that within-video anomaly structure and detector localization are decoupled. Third, on normal footage alone, every model we examine separates videos by recording properties, such as resolution and color encoding, indicating that scene sensitivity is shared across the setting rather than specific to any architecture. We publicly release a granularity-aware protocol computable from existing predictions and scene-factor annotations for UCF-Crime.