Towards Reasoning Centric Benchmark for Aerial Anomaly Understanding

While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer wide-area, high-altitude coverage for anomaly detection, they face challenges such as dynamic viewpoints, scale variations, and complex scenes. Existing datasets and methods, mainly designed for fixed ground-level views, struggle to adapt to these conditions, leading to significant performance drops in drone-view scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce A2Seek (Aerial Anomaly Seek), a large-scale, reasoning-centric benchmark dataset for aerial anomaly understanding. This dataset covers various scenarios and environmental conditions, providing high-resolution real-world aerial videos with detailed annotations, including anomaly categories, frame-level timestamps, region-level bounding boxes, and natural language explanations for causal reasoning. Building on this dataset, we propose A2Seek-R1, a novel reasoning framework that generalizes R1-style strategies to aerial anomaly understanding, enabling a deeper understanding of "Where" anomalies occur and "Why" they happen in aerial frames.