# Uncovering What, Why and How: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Causation Understanding of Video Anomaly Source: [Uncovering What, Why and How: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Causation Understanding of Video Anomaly]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2026-03-31T05:00:04.047Z Authors: 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 Published: 2024-04-30T20:11:49.000Z ## Abstract 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. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/fesvhtr/CUVA. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. - [Video Anomaly Effect Reasoning on CUVA 1.0 (test)](): Video Anomaly Effect Reasoning; CUVA 1.0 (test); BLEU: 0.38. - [Video Anomaly Causation Reasoning on CUVA 1.0 (test)](): Video Anomaly Causation Reasoning; CUVA 1.0 (test); BLEU: 0.51. - [Video Anomaly Description on CUVA 1.0 (test)](): Video Anomaly Description; CUVA 1.0 (test); BLEU: 0.55. - [Classification on CUVA](): Classification; CUVA; Accuracy: not recorded. - [Detection on CUVA](): Detection; CUVA; Accuracy: not recorded. - [Timestamp on CUVA](): Timestamp; CUVA; IoU: not recorded. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()