PrismVAU: Prompt-Refined Inference System for Multimodal Video Anomaly Understanding

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Hauptverfasser: Erregue, Iñaki, Nasrollahi, Kamal, Escalera, Sergio
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Erregue, Iñaki
Nasrollahi, Kamal
Escalera, Sergio
author_facet Erregue, Iñaki
Nasrollahi, Kamal
Escalera, Sergio
contents Video Anomaly Understanding (VAU) extends traditional Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) by not only localizing anomalies but also describing and reasoning about their context. Existing VAU approaches often rely on fine-tuned multimodal large language models (MLLMs) or external modules such as video captioners, which introduce costly annotations, complex training pipelines, and high inference overhead. In this work, we introduce PrismVAU, a lightweight yet effective system for real-time VAU that leverages a single off-the-shelf MLLM for anomaly scoring, explanation, and prompt optimization. PrismVAU operates in two complementary stages: (1) a coarse anomaly scoring module that computes frame-level anomaly scores via similarity to textual anchors, and (2) an MLLM-based refinement module that contextualizes anomalies through system and user prompts. Both textual anchors and prompts are optimized with a weakly supervised Automatic Prompt Engineering (APE) framework. Extensive experiments on standard VAD benchmarks demonstrate that PrismVAU delivers competitive detection performance and interpretable anomaly explanations -- without relying on instruction tuning, frame-level annotations, and external modules or dense processing -- making it an efficient and practical solution for real-world applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_02927
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PrismVAU: Prompt-Refined Inference System for Multimodal Video Anomaly Understanding
Erregue, Iñaki
Nasrollahi, Kamal
Escalera, Sergio
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Video Anomaly Understanding (VAU) extends traditional Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) by not only localizing anomalies but also describing and reasoning about their context. Existing VAU approaches often rely on fine-tuned multimodal large language models (MLLMs) or external modules such as video captioners, which introduce costly annotations, complex training pipelines, and high inference overhead. In this work, we introduce PrismVAU, a lightweight yet effective system for real-time VAU that leverages a single off-the-shelf MLLM for anomaly scoring, explanation, and prompt optimization. PrismVAU operates in two complementary stages: (1) a coarse anomaly scoring module that computes frame-level anomaly scores via similarity to textual anchors, and (2) an MLLM-based refinement module that contextualizes anomalies through system and user prompts. Both textual anchors and prompts are optimized with a weakly supervised Automatic Prompt Engineering (APE) framework. Extensive experiments on standard VAD benchmarks demonstrate that PrismVAU delivers competitive detection performance and interpretable anomaly explanations -- without relying on instruction tuning, frame-level annotations, and external modules or dense processing -- making it an efficient and practical solution for real-world applications.
title PrismVAU: Prompt-Refined Inference System for Multimodal Video Anomaly Understanding
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02927