Abstract: We present a meta-learning framework for weakly supervised anomaly detection in videos, where the detector learns to adapt to unseen types of abnormal activities effectively when only video-level annotations of binary labels are available.Our work is motivated by the fact that existing methods suffer from poor generalization to diverse unseen examples.We claim that an anomaly detector equipped with a meta-learning scheme alleviates the limitation by leading the model to an initialization point for better optimization.We evaluate the performance of our framework on two challenging datasets, UCF-Crime and ShanghaiTech. The experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm boosts the capability to localize unseen abnormal events in a weakly supervised setting.Besides the technical contributions, we perform the annotation of missing labels in the UCF-Crime dataset and make our task evaluated effectively.