Action hints: Semantic typicality and context uniqueness for generalizable skeleton-based video anomaly detection

Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Detection (ZS-VAD) requires temporally localizing anomalies without target domain training data, which is a crucial task due to various practical concerns, e.g., data privacy or new surveillance deployments. Skeleton-based approach has inherent generalizable advantages in achieving ZS-VAD as it eliminates domain disparities both in background and human appearance. However, existing methods only learn low-level skeleton representation and rely on the domain-limited normality boundary, which cannot generalize well to new scenes with different normal and abnormal behavior patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot video anomaly detection framework, unlocking the potential of skeleton data via action typicality and uniqueness learning. Firstly, we introduce a language-guided semantic typicality modeling module that projects skeleton snippets into action semantic space and distills LLM's knowledge of typical normal and abnormal behaviors during training. Secondly, we propose a test-time context uniqueness analysis module to finely analyze the spatio-temporal differences between skeleton snippets and then derive scene-adaptive boundaries. Without using any training samples from the target domain, our method achieves state-of-the-art results against skeleton-based methods on four large-scale VAD datasets: ShanghaiTech, UBnormal, NWPU, and UCF-Crime, featuring over 100 unseen surveillance scenes.