Shot-Conditioned Vision-Language Adaptation for Effective Harmful Content Detection from Online Short Videos

Abstract

Short video harmful content detection aims to automatically identify diverse anomalies from user-generated media. This task presents unique challenges due to frequent editing cuts and highly variable anomaly densities, limiting the effectiveness of traditional surveillance-based approaches. Moreover, existing Vision-Language Model-based approaches typically rely on rigid instance selection mechanisms that fail to adapt to the unpredictable duration of anomalies in such unconstrained videos. To address these issues, we propose SVLA, a Shot-conditioned Vision-Language Adaptation framework, for effectively detecting harmful contents from online short videos. Our approach introduces a novel π-adaptive strategy to dynamically estimate shot-level anomaly density, replacing rigid selection with calibrated supervision. Furthermore, we employ a shot-conditioned temporal encoder to respect video hierarchy and adopt a dual-path contextual adapter to resolve semantic ambiguity. To benchmark this task, we construct a new dataset (SVA) covering more genuine online short videos that involve seven anomaly categories. Experiments on the SVA dataset demonstrate that SVLA can achieve the state-of-the-art performance and outperform its competitors across diverse scenarios. Codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/xushuai7/IJCAI-SVLA.