Yuzhi Huang
Publications
TAU-Bench: From Anomaly Instance Tracking to Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding
Humans understand anomalous events through a coherent perceptual process in which they identify the focal instance, follow its behavior as the event unfolds, and interpret why it violates the expectations of the surrounding scene. Video anomaly understanding (VAU) seeks to endow models with a similar capability, moving beyond deciding whether a video is anomalous toward explaining how the event develops and why it matters. Although recent vision--language models (VLMs) can generate detailed and plausible anomaly descriptions, their semantic fluency does not ensure that these interpretations remain grounded in the correct anomaly instance over time. Existing benchmarks typically evaluate tracking and semantic understanding through separate protocols, leaving such instance--semantic inconsistency largely unmeasured. We therefore introduce TAU-Bench, a track-centric benchmark for jointly evaluating anomaly instance tracking and fine-grained anomaly understanding. TAU-Bench contains 1,118 videos, 1,454 tracks, and 202,438 pixel-level masks spanning 49 event and 45 scene categories, together with track-centric annotations that connect instance-level identification, event-level understanding, and scene-level reasoning. To build TAU-Bench at scale, we developed an automated data engine integrating anomaly suitability filtering, anomaly instance track construction, hierarchical caption annotation, and human quality control. Evaluations across representative VLM families show that models producing plausible anomaly interpretations may still fail to localize and track the correct instance reliably, revealing a persistent gap between semantic reasoning and visual grounding. These findings therefore highlight instance-grounded evaluation as an important step toward more faithful and reliable VAU systems.
ChainVLA: Chaining Vision-Language-Action Queries through a Unified Execution State for Long-Horizon Manipulation
Humans perform long-horizon manipulation by retaining knowledge of what earlier actions have established while continuously adapting the motion underway. By contrast, action-chunked vision-language-action (VLA) policies repeatedly replan from the current input at each query. Existing methods preserve either long-term task evidence through memory or short-term motion through action reuse and ensembling, leaving the cross-query handoff incomplete. We introduce ChainVLA, a 1.2B-parameter VLA policy that chains successive queries through a joint and revisable execution state. Progress Context combines a recurrent Working State with sparse event memory to carry observation-derived task progress, while Motion Tail feeds the preceding prediction's unexecuted continuation into state construction and action generation. Together, the two components condition a decoder that regenerates each action horizon under the latest observation, allowing the carried state to guide the next prediction without fixing it. ChainVLA reaches 62.8% average success on RMBench and 98.8% across four LIBERO suites, while removing Motion Tail or Progress Context reduces RMBench success to 11.2% and 3.0%, respectively. These asymmetric ablations are consistent with motion continuity helping preserve the observation stream from which task progress is inferred.