Video anomaly detection (VAD) has been paid increasing attention due to its
potential applications, its current dominant tasks focus on online detecting
anomalies% at the frame level, which can be roughly interpreted as the binary
or multiple event classification. However, such a setup that builds
relationships between complicated anomalous events and single labels, e.g.,
``vandalism'', is superficial, since single labels are deficient to
characterize anomalous events. In reality, users tend to search a specific
video rather than a series of approximate videos. Therefore, retrieving
anomalous events using detailed descriptions is practical and positive but few
researches focus on this. In this context, we propose a novel task called Video
Anomaly Retrieval (VAR), which aims to pragmatically retrieve relevant
anomalous videos by cross-modalities, e.g., language descriptions and
synchronous audios. Unlike the current video retrieval where videos are assumed
to be temporally well-trimmed with short duration, VAR is devised to retrieve
long untrimmed videos which may be partially relevant to the given query. To
achieve this, we present two large-scale VAR benchmarks, UCFCrime-AR and
XDViolence-AR, constructed on top of prevalent anomaly datasets. Meanwhile, we
design a model called Anomaly-Led Alignment Network (ALAN) for VAR. In ALAN, we
propose an anomaly-led sampling to focus on key segments in long untrimmed
videos. Then, we introduce an efficient pretext task to enhance semantic
associations between video-text fine-grained representations. Besides, we
leverage two complementary alignments to further match cross-modal contents.
Experimental results on two benchmarks reveal the challenges of VAR task and
also demonstrate the advantages of our tailored method.

视频异常检测已引起日益关注，然而目前主要集中于在线帧级别的异常检测任务，而不是利用详细描述来检索异常事件，因此我们提出了一种名为视频异常检索（VAR）的新任务，旨在通过跨模态方法检索相关的异常视频，并设计了一个名为 Anomaly-Led Alignment Network（ALAN）的模型来实现。