VALU: A Benchmark for Video Anomaly Temporal Localization and Understanding at Multiple Semantic Levels

Video anomaly understanding (VAU) is critical for real-world scenarios. Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) enhance the ability of VAU models to describe and interpret anomalies. However, progress in anomaly localization is still limited by two key issues. First, most existing video anomaly datasets only annotate segments that are clearly inconsistent with the context, often omitting subsequent segments that are semantically part of the same abnormal event. Second, the field lacks systematic evaluation protocols. To bridge these gaps, we introduce VALU, a new benchmark that explicitly defines anomalies across five semantic levels and provides comprehensive temporal boundaries and detailed textual descriptions for each. Based on these annotations, we design three evaluation tasks that comprehensively assess models' capabilities across different dimensions, including temporal grounding, anomaly localization, and anomaly detail discrimination. Evaluation results reveal persistent challenges in current models' capabilities on VAU. We further analyze and discuss these findings, and hope that both VALU and insights will advance research in VAU and the development of Video-LLMs. Our benchmark will be publicly available here.