Fine-VAD: Towards Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Detection via Progressive Cross-Granularity Learning

Menghao Zhang, Yiyan Zhu, Pengfei Ren, Haifeng Sun, Qi Qi, Zirui Zhuang, Huazheng Wang, Lei Zhang, Jianxin Liao, Jingyu Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 35514-35523

In this paper, we explore video anomaly detection (VAD) from a fine-grained perspective, which aims not only to detect anomalous events but also to identify their specific categories. Due to the limited number of examples per category, existing methods either fail to handle intra-class variation across diverse contexts or struggle with inter-class confusion caused by shared visual primitives. To address these challenges, we propose a progressive cross-granularity learning paradigm that leverages coarse- and fine-grained labels in a complementary manner to progressively refine representations from generic anomaly patterns to category-specific semantics. Building on this paradigm, we develop Fine-VAD, a progressive alignment framework that aligns video features with supervision signals at multiple granularities. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that Fine-VAD achieves up to 47.7% relative improvement in fine-grained anomaly classification. Notably, our paradigm generalizes well across diverse model architectures, offering an adaptable and effective solution for real-world fine-grained VAD.