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VADTree: Explainable Training-Free Video Anomaly Detection via Hierarchical Granularity-Aware Tree

Neural Information Processing Systems

Video anomaly detection (VAD) focuses on identifying anomalies in videos. Supervised methods demand substantial in-domain training data and fail to deliver clear explanations for anomalies. In contrast, training-free methods leverage the knowledge reserves and language interactivity of large pre-trained models to detect anomalies. However, the current fixed-length temporal window sampling approaches struggle to accurately capture anomalies with varying temporal spans. Therefore, we propose VADTree that utilizes a Hierarchical Granularityaware Tree (HGTree) structure for flexible sampling in VAD.


c9658e8c20879632cb1cfca91d80ceb7-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Time series anomaly detection plays a crucial role in a wide range of real-world applications. Given that time series data can exhibit different patterns at different sampling granularities, multi-scale modeling has proven beneficial for uncovering latent anomaly patterns that may not be apparent at a single scale. However, existing methods often model multi-scale information independently or rely on simple feature fusion strategies, neglecting the dynamic changes in cross-scale associations that occur during anomalies. Moreover, most approaches perform multi-scale modeling based on fixed sliding windows, which limits their ability to capture comprehensive contextual information. In this work, we propose CrossAD, a novel framework for time series Anomaly Detection that takes Cross-scale associations and Cross-window modeling into account. We propose a cross-scale reconstruction that reconstructs fine-grained series from coarser series, explicitly capturing cross-scale associations. Furthermore, we design a query library and incorporate global multi-scale context to overcome the limitations imposed by fixed window sizes. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple real-world datasets using nine evaluation metrics validate the effectiveness of CrossAD, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in anomaly detection.


Scalable, Explainable and Provably Robust Anomaly Detection with One-Step Flow Matching

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce Time-Conditioned Contraction Matching (TCCM), a novel method for semi-supervised anomaly detection in tabular data. TCCM is inspired by flow matching, a recent generative modeling framework that learns velocity fields between probability distributions and has shown strong performance compared to diffusion models and generative adversarial networks. Instead of directly applying flow matching as originally formulated, TCCM builds on its core idea--learning velocity fields between distributions--but simplifies the framework by predicting a time-conditioned contraction vector toward a fixed target (the origin) at each sampled time step. This design offers three key advantages: (1) a lightweight and scalable training objective that removes the need for solving ordinary differential equations during training and inference; (2) an efficient scoring strategy called one time-step deviation, which quantifies deviation from expected contraction behavior in a single forward pass, addressing the inference bottleneck of existing continuous-time models such as DTE (a diffusion-based model with leading anomaly detection accuracy but heavy inference cost); and (3) explainability and provable robustness, as the learned velocity field operates directly in input space, making the anomaly score inherently feature-wise attributable; moreover, the score function is Lipschitz-continuous with respect to the input, providing theoretical guarantees under small perturbations. Extensive experiments on the ADBench benchmark show that TCCM strikes a favorable balance between detection accuracy and inference cost, outperforming state-of-the-art methods--especially on high-dimensional and large-scale datasets.


MoniTor: Exploiting Large Language Models with Instruction for Online Video Anomaly Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) aims to locate unusual activities or behaviors within videos. Recently, offline VAD has garnered substantial research attention, which has been invigorated by the progress in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), offering the potential for a more nuanced understanding of anomalies. However, online VAD has seldom received attention due to real-time constraints and computational intensity. In this paper, we introduce a novel Memory-based online scoring queue scheme for Training-free VAD (MoniTor), to address the inherent complexities in online VAD. Specifically, MoniTor applies a streaming input to VLMs, leveraging the capabilities of pretrained large-scale models.


Channel Matters: Estimating Channel Influence for Multivariate Time Series

Neural Information Processing Systems

The influence function serves as an efficient post-hoc interpretability tool that quantifies the impact of training data modifications on model parameters, enabling enhanced model performance, improved generalization, and interpretability insights without the need for expensive retraining processes. Recently, Multivariate Time Series (MTS) analysis has become an important yet challenging task, attracting significant attention. While channel extremely matters to MTS tasks, channel-centric methods are still largely under-explored for MTS. Particularly, no previous work studied the effects of channel information of MTS in order to explore counterfactual effects between these channels and model performance. To fill this gap, we propose a novel Channel-wise Influence (ChInf) method that is the first to estimate the influence of different channels in MTS. Based on ChInf, we naturally derived two channel-wise algorithms by incorporating ChInf into classic MTS tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ChInf and ChInf-based methods in critical MTS analysis tasks, such as MTS anomaly detection and MTS data pruning. Specifically, our ChInf-based methods rank top-1 among all methods for comparison, while previous influence functions do not perform well on MTS anomaly detection tasks and MTS data pruning problem. This fully supports the superiority and necessity of ChInf.


Generalizing Single-Frame Supervision to Event-Level Understanding for Video Anomaly Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) aims to identify abnormal frames from discrete events within video sequences. Existing VAD methods suffer from heavy annotation burdens in fully-supervised paradigm, insensitivity to subtle anomalies in semi-supervised paradigm, and vulnerability to noise in weakly-supervised paradigm. To address these limitations, we propose a novel paradigm: SingleFrame supervised VAD (SF-VAD), which uses a single annotated abnormal frame per abnormal video. SF-VAD ensures annotation efficiency while offering precise anomaly reference, facilitating robust anomaly modeling, and enhancing the detection of subtle anomalies in complex visual contexts. To validate its effectiveness, we construct three SF-VAD benchmarks by manually re-annotating the ShanghaiTech, UCF-Crime, and XD-Violence datasets in a practical procedure. Further, we devise Frame-guided Progressive Learning (FPL), to generalize sparse frame supervision to event-level anomaly understanding. FPL first leverages evidential learning to estimate anomaly relevance guided by annotated frames. Then it extends anomaly supervision by mining discrete abnormal events based on anomaly relevance and feature similarity.


Unsupervised Domain Shift Detection with Interpretable Subspace Attribution

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We developed a tool for detecting domain shifts, namely subtle differences in the probability distributions of datasets. We identify these shifts using an algorithm designed to detect localised density anomalies in high-dimensional feature spaces. If an anomaly is present, we then identify the feature subspace in which the anomaly is most pronounced. This allows us to trace the domain shift to a small set of features, making the shift interpretable. Moreover, we provide a protocol for compensating domain shifts by extracting, from two unlabelled datasets, subsets of samples with no detectable residual distributional difference. We validate the framework on controlled 20-dimensional benchmarks with known ground truth, recovering both broad and localized shifts together with their supporting feature subspaces. We then apply it to healthy electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings represented by 782 features. In age- and sex-matched cohort comparisons differing in measurement-device composition, the method detects device-induced shifts, extracts representative subsets enriched in the imbalanced device components, and identifies ECG features associated with the acquisition contrast. These results suggest that density-shift detection and subspace attribution provide a practical framework for uncovering hidden cohort biases before downstream modelling.


When Does Trimming Help Conformal Prediction? A Retained-Law Diagnostic under Calibration Contamination

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Trimming suspicious calibration points is a common response to contamination in conformal prediction. Its effect on clean-target coverage, however, is governed by the retained law induced by trimming, not by the contamination level alone. We analyse fixed-threshold trimming as conditioning rather than purification. It replaces the contaminated calibration law with a retained law, reducing clean-target coverage to a one-dimensional score-CDF transfer problem with an exact finite-sample identity. A componentwise bound on the transfer gap gives a population-level diagnostic. This separates a clean-side covariance cost from a retained-contamination cost, governed by the dirty-to-clean retention ratio. Trimming helps when the anomaly score separates retention probabilities while remaining score-neutral on the clean population. Otherwise, it cannot substantially reduce contamination through the retained mixture coefficient. We also give finite-sample certificate templates that provide numerical guarantees under independent audit.


Adaptive graph-based algorithms for conditional anomaly detection and semi-supervised learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We develop graph-based methods for semi-supervised learning based on label propagation on a data similarity graph. When data is abundant or arrive in a stream, the problems of computation and data storage arise for any graph-based method. We propose a fast approximate online algorithm that solves for the harmonic solution on an approximate graph. We show, both empirically and theoretically, that good behavior can be achieved by collapsing nearby points into a set of local representative points that minimize distortion. Moreover, we regularize the harmonic solution to achieve better stability properties. We also present graph-based methods for detecting conditional anomalies and apply them to the identification of unusual clinical actions in hospitals. Our hypothesis is that patient-management actions that are unusual with respect to the past patients may be due to errors and that it is worthwhile to raise an alert if such a condition is encountered. Conditional anomaly detection extends standard unconditional anomaly framework but also faces new problems known as fringe and isolated points. We devise novel nonparametric graph-based methods to tackle these problems. Our methods rely on graph connectivity analysis and soft harmonic solution. Finally, we conduct an extensive human evaluation study of our conditional anomaly methods by 15 experts in critical care.