FineVAU: A Novel Human-Aligned Benchmark for Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Pereira, João, Lopes, Vasco, Neves, João, Semedo, David
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Pereira, João
Lopes, Vasco
Neves, João
Semedo, David
author_facet Pereira, João
Lopes, Vasco
Neves, João
Semedo, David
contents Video Anomaly Understanding (VAU) is a novel task focused on describing unusual occurrences in videos. Despite growing interest, the evaluation of VAU remains an open challenge. Existing benchmarks rely on n-gram-based metrics (e.g., BLEU, ROUGE-L) or LLM-based evaluation. The first fails to capture the rich, free-form, and visually grounded nature of LVLM responses, while the latter focuses on assessing language quality over factual relevance, often resulting in subjective judgments that are misaligned with human perception. In this work, we address this issue by proposing FineVAU, a new benchmark for VAU that shifts the focus towards rich, fine-grained and domain-specific understanding of anomalous videos. We formulate VAU as a three-fold problem, with the goal of comprehensively understanding key descriptive elements of anomalies in video: events (What), participating entities (Who) and location (Where). Our benchmark introduces a) FVScore, a novel, human-aligned evaluation metric that assesses the presence of critical visual elements in LVLM answers, providing interpretable, fine-grained feedback; and b) FineW3, a novel, comprehensive dataset curated through a structured and fully automatic procedure that augments existing human annotations with high quality, fine-grained visual information. Human evaluation reveals that our proposed metric has a superior alignment with human perception of anomalies in comparison to current approaches. Detailed experiments on FineVAU unveil critical limitations in LVLM's ability to perceive anomalous events that require spatial and fine-grained temporal understanding, despite strong performance on coarse grain, static information, and events with strong visual cues.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_17258
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FineVAU: A Novel Human-Aligned Benchmark for Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding
Pereira, João
Lopes, Vasco
Neves, João
Semedo, David
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Video Anomaly Understanding (VAU) is a novel task focused on describing unusual occurrences in videos. Despite growing interest, the evaluation of VAU remains an open challenge. Existing benchmarks rely on n-gram-based metrics (e.g., BLEU, ROUGE-L) or LLM-based evaluation. The first fails to capture the rich, free-form, and visually grounded nature of LVLM responses, while the latter focuses on assessing language quality over factual relevance, often resulting in subjective judgments that are misaligned with human perception. In this work, we address this issue by proposing FineVAU, a new benchmark for VAU that shifts the focus towards rich, fine-grained and domain-specific understanding of anomalous videos. We formulate VAU as a three-fold problem, with the goal of comprehensively understanding key descriptive elements of anomalies in video: events (What), participating entities (Who) and location (Where). Our benchmark introduces a) FVScore, a novel, human-aligned evaluation metric that assesses the presence of critical visual elements in LVLM answers, providing interpretable, fine-grained feedback; and b) FineW3, a novel, comprehensive dataset curated through a structured and fully automatic procedure that augments existing human annotations with high quality, fine-grained visual information. Human evaluation reveals that our proposed metric has a superior alignment with human perception of anomalies in comparison to current approaches. Detailed experiments on FineVAU unveil critical limitations in LVLM's ability to perceive anomalous events that require spatial and fine-grained temporal understanding, despite strong performance on coarse grain, static information, and events with strong visual cues.
title FineVAU: A Novel Human-Aligned Benchmark for Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17258