Papers › Uncovering What Why and How: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Causation Understanding of...

Uncovering What Why and How: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Causation Understanding of Video Anomaly

1 Jan 2024CVPR 2024 1archive 2025-07-28

Hang Du, Sicheng Zhang, Binzhu Xie, Guoshun Nan, Jiayang Zhang, Junrui Xu, Hangyu Liu, Sicong Leng, Jiangming Liu, Hehe Fan, Dajiu Huang, Jing Feng, Linli Chen, Can Zhang, Xuhuan Li, Hao Zhang, Jianhang Chen, Qimei Cui, Xiaofeng Tao

Video anomaly understanding (VAU) aims to automatically comprehend unusual occurrences in videos thereby enabling various applications such as traffic surveillance and industrial manufacturing. While existing VAU benchmarks primarily concentrate on anomaly detection and localization our focus is on more practicality prompting us to raise the following crucial questions: "what anomaly occurred?" "why did it happen?" and "how severe is this abnormal event?". In pursuit of these answers we present a comprehensive benchmark for Causation Understanding of Video Anomaly (CUVA). Specifically each instance of the proposed benchmark involves three sets of human annotations to indicate the "what" "why" and "how" of an anomaly including 1) anomaly type start and end times and event descriptions 2) natural language explanations for the cause of an anomaly and 3) free text reflecting the effect of the abnormality. In addition we also introduce MMEval a novel evaluation metric designed to better align with human preferences for CUVA facilitating the measurement of existing LLMs in comprehending the underlying cause and corresponding effect of video anomalies. Finally we propose a novel prompt-based method that can serve as a baseline approach for the challenging CUVA. We conduct extensive experiments to show the superiority of our evaluation metric and the prompt-based approach.

PaperPDFCode

Code

fesvhtr/cuva officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Anomaly Detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

ALIGNFocus

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections