From Detection to Understanding: TAR and TAR-Bench for Multi-Task Traffic Anomaly Reasoning

Detecting a traffic anomaly does not establish whether a video-language model can explain what happened, localize it in time, or identify its causes. We introduce TAR (Traffic Anomaly Reasoning) and TAR-Bench, paired resources for training and evaluating these complementary capabilities across 10 tasks spanning question answering, temporal reasoning, and scene understanding. TAR contains 44,040 automatically generated annotations with chain-of-thought traces for 3,670 CCTV videos from eight public datasets. TAR-Bench provides 960 human-curated annotations for 80 held-out clips from 17 public YouTube videos. Evaluation of eleven vision-language models reveals a gap between question-answering performance and temporal or scene reasoning. Progressively adding task groups during supervised fine-tuning improves aggregate performance on both Cosmos-Reason2-8B and Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct. Training on all 10 tasks raises their mean benchmark scores from 34.3 to 55.7 and from 30.9 to 53.9, respectively. These results support joint training across complementary tasks as a promising approach to traffic anomaly understanding, while highlighting persistent limitations in temporal precision and causal attribution. TAR and TAR-Bench serve as the official training and in-domain evaluation resources for AI City Challenge 2026 Track 3.The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/PhysicalAI-Traffic-Anomaly-Reasoning