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.

Language Models (LMs) acquire factual knowledge during pre-training and store it in the parameters, which can be valuable for downstream tasks. As world evolves, some facts may be incorrectly induced or become obsolete over time. Various model editing methods have been proposed to modify specific examples in LMs. However, existing training-based methods still suffer from sub-optimal locality, where irrelevant neighborhood examples can be adversely influenced. Model’s gradients are still struggling to identify the appropriate direction when updating the parameters. To address this issue, we find that directing the hidden state of the edit example towards spaces where semantics are sparse tends to help preserve the semantics of irrelevant neighborhood examples. Based on this hypothesis, we propose a novel metric, named SSS, to evaluate the degree of sparsity around a sentence embedding in the semantic space without any human or machine annotation. Subsequently, we incorporate SSS into the original loss function of the existing training-based methods to enhance locality. Experiments conducted on two datasets across various models demonstrate that SSS is effective in improving both locality and reasoning capability.