Daily Papers

Recent advancements in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have opened new avenues for applications in Embodied AI. Building on previous work, EgoThink, we introduce VidEgoThink, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating egocentric video understanding capabilities. To bridge the gap between MLLMs and low-level control in Embodied AI, we design four key interrelated tasks: video question-answering, hierarchy planning, visual grounding and reward modeling. To minimize manual annotation costs, we develop an automatic data generation pipeline based on the Ego4D dataset, leveraging the prior knowledge and multimodal capabilities of GPT-4o. Three human annotators then filter the generated data to ensure diversity and quality, resulting in the VidEgoThink benchmark. We conduct extensive experiments with three types of models: API-based MLLMs, open-source image-based MLLMs, and open-source video-based MLLMs. Experimental results indicate that all MLLMs, including GPT-4o, perform poorly across all tasks related to egocentric video understanding. These findings suggest that foundation models still require significant advancements to be effectively applied to first-person scenarios in Embodied AI. In conclusion, VidEgoThink reflects a research trend towards employing MLLMs for egocentric vision, akin to human capabilities, enabling active observation and interaction in the complex real-world environments.

Egocentric video-language understanding demands both high efficiency and accurate spatial-temporal modeling. Existing approaches face three key challenges: 1) Excessive pre-training cost arising from multi-stage pre-training pipelines, 2) Ineffective spatial-temporal encoding due to manually split 3D rotary positional embeddings that hinder feature interactions, and 3) Imprecise learning objectives in soft-label multi-instance retrieval, which neglect negative pair correlations. In this paper, we introduce EVA02-AT, a suite of EVA02-based video-language foundation models tailored to egocentric video understanding tasks. EVA02-AT first efficiently transfers an image-based CLIP model into a unified video encoder via a single-stage pretraining. Second, instead of applying rotary positional embeddings to isolated dimensions, we introduce spatial-temporal rotary positional embeddings along with joint attention, which can effectively encode both spatial and temporal information on the entire hidden dimension. This joint encoding of spatial-temporal features enables the model to learn cross-axis relationships, which are crucial for accurately modeling motion and interaction in videos. Third, focusing on multi-instance video-language retrieval tasks, we introduce the Symmetric Multi-Similarity (SMS) loss and a novel training framework that advances all soft labels for both positive and negative pairs, providing a more precise learning objective. Extensive experiments on Ego4D, EPIC-Kitchens-100, and Charades-Ego under zero-shot and fine-tuning settings demonstrate that EVA02-AT achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse egocentric video-language tasks with fewer parameters. Models with our SMS loss also show significant performance gains on multi-instance retrieval benchmarks. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/xqwang14/EVA02-AT .

Emerging embodied AI applications, such as wearable cameras and autonomous agents, have underscored the need for robust reasoning from first person video streams. We introduce EgoVLM, a vision-language model specifically designed to integrate visual comprehension and spatial-temporal reasoning within egocentric video contexts. EgoVLM is fine-tuned via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a reinforcement learning method adapted to align model outputs with human-like reasoning steps. Following DeepSeek R1-Zero's approach, we directly tune using RL without any supervised fine-tuning phase on chain-of-thought (CoT) data. We evaluate EgoVLM on egocentric video question answering benchmarks and show that domain-specific training substantially improves performance over general-purpose VLMs. Our EgoVLM-3B, trained exclusively on non-CoT egocentric data, outperforms the base Qwen2.5-VL 3B and 7B models by 14.33 and 13.87 accuracy points on the EgoSchema benchmark, respectively. By explicitly generating reasoning traces, EgoVLM enhances interpretability, making it well-suited for downstream applications. Furthermore, we introduce a novel keyframe-based reward that incorporates salient frame selection to guide reinforcement learning optimization. This reward formulation opens a promising avenue for future exploration in temporally grounded egocentric reasoning.

Long-form egocentric video understanding provides rich contextual information and unique insights into long-term human behaviors, holding significant potential for applications in embodied intelligence, long-term activity analysis, and personalized assistive technologies. However, existing benchmark datasets primarily focus on single, short-duration videos or moderately long videos up to dozens of minutes, leaving a substantial gap in evaluating extensive, ultra-long egocentric video recordings. To address this, we introduce X-LeBench, a novel benchmark dataset specifically crafted for evaluating tasks on extremely long egocentric video recordings. Leveraging the advanced text processing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), X-LeBench develops a life-logging simulation pipeline that produces realistic, coherent daily plans aligned with real-world video data. This approach enables the flexible integration of synthetic daily plans with real-world footage from Ego4D-a massive-scale egocentric video dataset covers a wide range of daily life scenarios-resulting in 432 simulated video life logs that mirror realistic daily activities in contextually rich scenarios. The video life-log durations span from 23 minutes to 16.4 hours. The evaluation of several baseline systems and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) reveals their poor performance across the board, highlighting the inherent challenges of long-form egocentric video understanding and underscoring the need for more advanced models.

AI personal assistants deployed via robots or wearables require embodied understanding to collaborate with humans effectively. However, current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) primarily focus on third-person view videos, neglecting the richness of egocentric perceptual experience. To address this gap, we propose three key contributions. First, we introduce the Egocentric Video Understanding Dataset (EVUD) for training VLMs on video captioning and question answering tasks specific to egocentric videos. Second, we present AlanaVLM, a 7B parameter VLM trained using parameter-efficient methods on EVUD. Finally, we evaluate AlanaVLM's capabilities on OpenEQA, a challenging benchmark for embodied video question answering. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming open-source models including strong Socratic models using GPT-4 as a planner by 3.6%. Additionally, we outperform Claude 3 and Gemini Pro Vision 1.0 and showcase competitive results compared to Gemini Pro 1.5 and GPT-4V, even surpassing the latter in spatial reasoning. This research paves the way for building efficient VLMs that can be deployed in robots or wearables, leveraging embodied video understanding to collaborate seamlessly with humans in everyday tasks, contributing to the next generation of Embodied AI.

This paper investigates the problem of understanding dynamic 3D scenes from egocentric observations, a key challenge in robotics and embodied AI. Unlike prior studies that explored this as long-form video understanding and utilized egocentric video only, we instead propose an LLM-based agent, Embodied VideoAgent, which constructs scene memory from both egocentric video and embodied sensory inputs (e.g. depth and pose sensing). We further introduce a VLM-based approach to automatically update the memory when actions or activities over objects are perceived. Embodied VideoAgent attains significant advantages over counterparts in challenging reasoning and planning tasks in 3D scenes, achieving gains of 4.9% on Ego4D-VQ3D, 5.8% on OpenEQA, and 11.7% on EnvQA. We have also demonstrated its potential in various embodied AI tasks including generating embodied interactions and perception for robot manipulation. The code and demo will be made public.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly pushed the frontier of egocentric video question answering (EgocentricQA). However, existing benchmarks and studies are mainly limited to common daily activities such as cooking and cleaning. In contrast, real-world deployment inevitably encounters domain shifts, where target domains differ substantially in both visual style and semantic content. To bridge this gap, we introduce EgoCross, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the cross-domain generalization of MLLMs in EgocentricQA. EgoCross covers four diverse and challenging domains, including surgery, industry, extreme sports, and animal perspective, representing realistic and high-impact application scenarios. It comprises approximately 1,000 QA pairs across 798 video clips, spanning four key QA tasks: prediction, recognition, localization, and counting. Each QA pair provides both OpenQA and CloseQA formats to support fine-grained evaluation. Extensive experiments show that most existing MLLMs, whether general-purpose or egocentric-specialized, struggle to generalize to domains beyond daily life, highlighting the limitations of current models. Furthermore, we conduct several pilot studies, \eg, fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to explore potential improvements. We hope EgoCross and our accompanying analysis will serve as a foundation for advancing domain-adaptive, robust egocentric video understanding. Data and codes will be released at: https://github.com/MyUniverse0726/EgoCross{https://github.com/MyUniverse0726/EgoCross.}

The focal point of egocentric video understanding is modelling hand-object interactions. Standard models, e.g. CNNs or Vision Transformers, which receive RGB frames as input perform well. However, their performance improves further by employing additional input modalities that provide complementary cues, such as object detections, optical flow, audio, etc. The added complexity of the modality-specific modules, on the other hand, makes these models impractical for deployment. The goal of this work is to retain the performance of such a multimodal approach, while using only the RGB frames as input at inference time. We demonstrate that for egocentric action recognition on the Epic-Kitchens and the Something-Something datasets, students which are taught by multimodal teachers tend to be more accurate and better calibrated than architecturally equivalent models trained on ground truth labels in a unimodal or multimodal fashion. We further adopt a principled multimodal knowledge distillation framework, allowing us to deal with issues which occur when applying multimodal knowledge distillation in a naive manner. Lastly, we demonstrate the achieved reduction in computational complexity, and show that our approach maintains higher performance with the reduction of the number of input views. We release our code at https://github.com/gorjanradevski/multimodal-distillation.

This research aims to comprehensively explore building a multimodal foundation model for egocentric video understanding. To achieve this goal, we work on three fronts. First, as there is a lack of QA data for egocentric video understanding, we develop a data engine that efficiently generates 7M high-quality QA samples for egocentric videos ranging from 30 seconds to one hour long, based on human-annotated data. This is currently the largest egocentric QA dataset. Second, we contribute a challenging egocentric QA benchmark with 629 videos and 7,026 questions to evaluate the models' ability in recognizing and memorizing visual details across videos of varying lengths. We introduce a new de-biasing evaluation method to help mitigate the unavoidable language bias present in the models being evaluated. Third, we propose a specialized multimodal architecture featuring a novel "Memory Pointer Prompting" mechanism. This design includes a global glimpse step to gain an overarching understanding of the entire video and identify key visual information, followed by a fallback step that utilizes the key visual information to generate responses. This enables the model to more effectively comprehend extended video content. With the data, benchmark, and model, we successfully build MM-Ego, an egocentric multimodal LLM that shows powerful performance on egocentric video understanding.

Spatiotemporal video grounding aims to localize target entities in videos based on textual queries. While existing research has made significant progress in exocentric videos, the egocentric setting remains relatively underexplored, despite its growing importance in applications such as augmented reality and robotics. In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of the discrepancies between egocentric and exocentric videos, revealing key challenges such as shorter object durations, sparser trajectories, smaller object sizes, and larger positional shifts. To address these challenges, we introduce EgoMask, the first pixel-level benchmark for fine-grained spatiotemporal grounding in egocentric videos. It is constructed by our proposed automatic annotation pipeline, which annotates referring expressions and object masks across short-, medium-, and long-term videos. Additionally, we create EgoMask-Train, a large-scale training dataset to facilitate model development. Experiments demonstrate that the state-of-the-art spatiotemporal grounding models perform poorly on our benchmark EgoMask, but fine-tuning on EgoMask-Train yields significant improvements, while preserving performance on exocentric datasets. Our work thus provides essential resources and insights for advancing egocentric video understanding. Our code is available at https://github.com/LaVi-Lab/EgoMask .

We introduce EgoLife, a project to develop an egocentric life assistant that accompanies and enhances personal efficiency through AI-powered wearable glasses. To lay the foundation for this assistant, we conducted a comprehensive data collection study where six participants lived together for one week, continuously recording their daily activities - including discussions, shopping, cooking, socializing, and entertainment - using AI glasses for multimodal egocentric video capture, along with synchronized third-person-view video references. This effort resulted in the EgoLife Dataset, a comprehensive 300-hour egocentric, interpersonal, multiview, and multimodal daily life dataset with intensive annotation. Leveraging this dataset, we introduce EgoLifeQA, a suite of long-context, life-oriented question-answering tasks designed to provide meaningful assistance in daily life by addressing practical questions such as recalling past relevant events, monitoring health habits, and offering personalized recommendations. To address the key technical challenges of (1) developing robust visual-audio models for egocentric data, (2) enabling identity recognition, and (3) facilitating long-context question answering over extensive temporal information, we introduce EgoButler, an integrated system comprising EgoGPT and EgoRAG. EgoGPT is an omni-modal model trained on egocentric datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance on egocentric video understanding. EgoRAG is a retrieval-based component that supports answering ultra-long-context questions. Our experimental studies verify their working mechanisms and reveal critical factors and bottlenecks, guiding future improvements. By releasing our datasets, models, and benchmarks, we aim to stimulate further research in egocentric AI assistants.

The emergence of advanced multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has significantly enhanced AI assistants' ability to process complex information across modalities. Recently, egocentric videos, by directly capturing user focus, actions, and context in an unified coordinate, offer an exciting opportunity to enable proactive and personalized AI user experiences with MLLMs. However, existing benchmarks overlook the crucial role of gaze as an indicator of user intent. To address this gap, we introduce EgoGazeVQA, an egocentric gaze-guided video question answering benchmark that leverages gaze information to improve the understanding of longer daily-life videos. EgoGazeVQA consists of gaze-based QA pairs generated by MLLMs and refined by human annotators. Our experiments reveal that existing MLLMs struggle to accurately interpret user intentions. In contrast, our gaze-guided intent prompting methods significantly enhance performance by integrating spatial, temporal, and intent-related cues. We further conduct experiments on gaze-related fine-tuning and analyze how gaze estimation accuracy impacts prompting effectiveness. These results underscore the value of gaze for more personalized and effective AI assistants in egocentric settings. Project page: https://taiyi98.github.io/projects/EgoGazeVQA

Human team tactics emerge from each player's individual perspective and their ability to anticipate, interpret, and adapt to teammates' intentions. While advances in video understanding have improved the modeling of team interactions in sports, most existing work relies on third-person broadcast views and overlooks the synchronous, egocentric nature of multi-agent learning. We introduce X-Ego-CS, a benchmark dataset consisting of 124 hours of gameplay footage from 45 professional-level matches of the popular e-sports game Counter-Strike 2, designed to facilitate research on multi-agent decision-making in complex 3D environments. X-Ego-CS provides cross-egocentric video streams that synchronously capture all players' first-person perspectives along with state-action trajectories. Building on this resource, we propose Cross-Ego Contrastive Learning (CECL), which aligns teammates' egocentric visual streams to foster team-level tactical situational awareness from an individual's perspective. We evaluate CECL on a teammate-opponent location prediction task, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing an agent's ability to infer both teammate and opponent positions from a single first-person view using state-of-the-art video encoders. Together, X-Ego-CS and CECL establish a foundation for cross-egocentric multi-agent benchmarking in esports. More broadly, our work positions gameplay understanding as a testbed for multi-agent modeling and tactical learning, with implications for spatiotemporal reasoning and human-AI teaming in both virtual and real-world domains. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/HATS-ICT/x-ego.

Transferring and integrating knowledge across first-person (egocentric) and third-person (exocentric) viewpoints is intrinsic to human intelligence, enabling humans to learn from others and convey insights from their own experiences. Despite rapid progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their ability to perform such cross-view reasoning remains unexplored. To address this, we introduce EgoExoBench, the first benchmark for egocentric-exocentric video understanding and reasoning. Built from publicly available datasets, EgoExoBench comprises over 7,300 question-answer pairs spanning eleven sub-tasks organized into three core challenges: semantic alignment, viewpoint association, and temporal reasoning. We evaluate 13 state-of-the-art MLLMs and find that while these models excel on single-view tasks, they struggle to align semantics across perspectives, accurately associate views, and infer temporal dynamics in the ego-exo context. We hope EgoExoBench can serve as a valuable resource for research on embodied agents and intelligent assistants seeking human-like cross-view intelligence.

Egocentric video generation with fine-grained control through body motion is a key requirement towards embodied AI agents that can simulate, predict, and plan actions. In this work, we propose EgoControl, a pose-controllable video diffusion model trained on egocentric data. We train a video prediction model to condition future frame generation on explicit 3D body pose sequences. To achieve precise motion control, we introduce a novel pose representation that captures both global camera dynamics and articulated body movements, and integrate it through a dedicated control mechanism within the diffusion process. Given a short sequence of observed frames and a sequence of target poses, EgoControl generates temporally coherent and visually realistic future frames that align with the provided pose control. Experimental results demonstrate that EgoControl produces high-quality, pose-consistent egocentric videos, paving the way toward controllable embodied video simulation and understanding.

Egocentric video-language pretraining is a crucial step in advancing the understanding of hand-object interactions in first-person scenarios. Despite successes on existing testbeds, we find that current EgoVLMs can be easily misled by simple modifications, such as changing the verbs or nouns in interaction descriptions, with models struggling to distinguish between these changes. This raises the question: Do EgoVLMs truly understand hand-object interactions? To address this question, we introduce a benchmark called EgoHOIBench, revealing the performance limitation of current egocentric models when confronted with such challenges. We attribute this performance gap to insufficient fine-grained supervision and the greater difficulty EgoVLMs experience in recognizing verbs compared to nouns. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel asymmetric contrastive objective named EgoNCE++. For the video-to-text objective, we enhance text supervision by generating negative captions using large language models or leveraging pretrained vocabulary for HOI-related word substitutions. For the text-to-video objective, we focus on preserving an object-centric feature space that clusters video representations based on shared nouns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EgoNCE++ significantly enhances EgoHOI understanding, leading to improved performance across various EgoVLMs in tasks such as multi-instance retrieval, action recognition, and temporal understanding. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuboshen/EgoNCEpp.

Understanding human actions from videos of first-person view poses significant challenges. Most prior approaches explore representation learning on egocentric videos only, while overlooking the potential benefit of exploiting existing large-scale third-person videos. In this paper, (1) we develop EgoInstructor, a retrieval-augmented multimodal captioning model that automatically retrieves semantically relevant third-person instructional videos to enhance the video captioning of egocentric videos. (2) For training the cross-view retrieval module, we devise an automatic pipeline to discover ego-exo video pairs from distinct large-scale egocentric and exocentric datasets. (3) We train the cross-view retrieval module with a novel EgoExoNCE loss that pulls egocentric and exocentric video features closer by aligning them to shared text features that describe similar actions. (4) Through extensive experiments, our cross-view retrieval module demonstrates superior performance across seven benchmarks. Regarding egocentric video captioning, EgoInstructor exhibits significant improvements by leveraging third-person videos as references.

Egocentric perception enables humans to experience and understand the world directly from their own point of view. Translating exocentric (third-person) videos into egocentric (first-person) videos opens up new possibilities for immersive understanding but remains highly challenging due to extreme camera pose variations and minimal view overlap. This task requires faithfully preserving visible content while synthesizing unseen regions in a geometrically consistent manner. To achieve this, we present EgoX, a novel framework for generating egocentric videos from a single exocentric input. EgoX leverages the pretrained spatio temporal knowledge of large-scale video diffusion models through lightweight LoRA adaptation and introduces a unified conditioning strategy that combines exocentric and egocentric priors via width and channel wise concatenation. Additionally, a geometry-guided self-attention mechanism selectively attends to spatially relevant regions, ensuring geometric coherence and high visual fidelity. Our approach achieves coherent and realistic egocentric video generation while demonstrating strong scalability and robustness across unseen and in-the-wild videos.

Neural rendering is fuelling a unification of learning, 3D geometry and video understanding that has been waiting for more than two decades. Progress, however, is still hampered by a lack of suitable datasets and benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce EPIC Fields, an augmentation of EPIC-KITCHENS with 3D camera information. Like other datasets for neural rendering, EPIC Fields removes the complex and expensive step of reconstructing cameras using photogrammetry, and allows researchers to focus on modelling problems. We illustrate the challenge of photogrammetry in egocentric videos of dynamic actions and propose innovations to address them. Compared to other neural rendering datasets, EPIC Fields is better tailored to video understanding because it is paired with labelled action segments and the recent VISOR segment annotations. To further motivate the community, we also evaluate two benchmark tasks in neural rendering and segmenting dynamic objects, with strong baselines that showcase what is not possible today. We also highlight the advantage of geometry in semi-supervised video object segmentations on the VISOR annotations. EPIC Fields reconstructs 96% of videos in EPICKITCHENS, registering 19M frames in 99 hours recorded in 45 kitchens.

In Composed Video Retrieval, a video and a textual description which modifies the video content are provided as inputs to the model. The aim is to retrieve the relevant video with the modified content from a database of videos. In this challenging task, the first step is to acquire large-scale training datasets and collect high-quality benchmarks for evaluation. In this work, we introduce EgoCVR, a new evaluation benchmark for fine-grained Composed Video Retrieval using large-scale egocentric video datasets. EgoCVR consists of 2,295 queries that specifically focus on high-quality temporal video understanding. We find that existing Composed Video Retrieval frameworks do not achieve the necessary high-quality temporal video understanding for this task. To address this shortcoming, we adapt a simple training-free method, propose a generic re-ranking framework for Composed Video Retrieval, and demonstrate that this achieves strong results on EgoCVR. Our code and benchmark are freely available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/EgoCVR.

Recent advancements in large-scale video-language models have shown significant potential for real-time planning and detailed interactions. However, their high computational demands and the scarcity of annotated datasets limit their practicality for academic researchers. In this work, we introduce VideoLLaMB, a novel framework that utilizes temporal memory tokens within bridge layers to allow for the encoding of entire video sequences alongside historical visual data, effectively preserving semantic continuity and enhancing model performance across various tasks. This approach includes recurrent memory tokens and a SceneTilling algorithm, which segments videos into independent semantic units to preserve semantic integrity. Empirically, VideoLLaMB significantly outstrips existing video-language models, demonstrating a 5.5 points improvement over its competitors across three VideoQA benchmarks, and 2.06 points on egocentric planning. Comprehensive results on the MVBench show that VideoLLaMB-7B achieves markedly better results than previous 7B models of same LLM. Remarkably, it maintains robust performance as PLLaVA even as video length increases up to 8 times. Besides, the frame retrieval results on our specialized Needle in a Video Haystack (NIAVH) benchmark, further validate VideoLLaMB's prowess in accurately identifying specific frames within lengthy videos. Our SceneTilling algorithm also enables the generation of streaming video captions directly, without necessitating additional training. In terms of efficiency, VideoLLaMB, trained on 16 frames, supports up to 320 frames on a single Nvidia A100 GPU with linear GPU memory scaling, ensuring both high performance and cost-effectiveness, thereby setting a new foundation for long-form video-language models in both academic and practical applications.

Assessing human skill levels in complex activities is a challenging problem with applications in sports, rehabilitation, and training. In this work, we present SkillFormer, a parameter-efficient architecture for unified multi-view proficiency estimation from egocentric and exocentric videos. Building on the TimeSformer backbone, SkillFormer introduces a CrossViewFusion module that fuses view-specific features using multi-head cross-attention, learnable gating, and adaptive self-calibration. We leverage Low-Rank Adaptation to fine-tune only a small subset of parameters, significantly reducing training costs. In fact, when evaluated on the EgoExo4D dataset, SkillFormer achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in multi-view settings while demonstrating remarkable computational efficiency, using 4.5x fewer parameters and requiring 3.75x fewer training epochs than prior baselines. It excels in multiple structured tasks, confirming the value of multi-view integration for fine-grained skill assessment.

The evaluation of Long Video Understanding (LVU) performance poses an important but challenging research problem. Despite previous efforts, the existing video understanding benchmarks are severely constrained by several issues, especially the insufficient lengths of videos, a lack of diversity in video types and evaluation tasks, and the inappropriateness for evaluating LVU performances. To address the above problems, we propose a new benchmark, called MLVU (Multi-task Long Video Understanding Benchmark), for the comprehensive and in-depth evaluation of LVU. MLVU presents the following critical values: 1) The substantial and flexible extension of video lengths, which enables the benchmark to evaluate LVU performance across a wide range of durations. 2) The inclusion of various video genres, e.g., movies, surveillance footage, egocentric videos, cartoons, game videos, etc., which reflects the models' LVU performances in different scenarios. 3) The development of diversified evaluation tasks, which enables a comprehensive examination of MLLMs' key abilities in long-video understanding. The empirical study with 20 latest MLLMs reveals significant room for improvement in today's technique, as all existing methods struggle with most of the evaluation tasks and exhibit severe performance degradation when handling longer videos. Additionally, it suggests that factors such as context length, image-understanding quality, and the choice of LLM backbone can play critical roles in future advancements. We anticipate that MLVU will advance the research of long video understanding by providing a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of MLLMs.

Can Video-LLMs achieve consistent temporal understanding when videos capture the same event from different viewpoints? To study this, we introduce EgoExo-Con (Consistency), a benchmark of comprehensively synchronized egocentric and exocentric video pairs with human-refined queries in natural language. EgoExo-Con emphasizes two temporal understanding tasks: Temporal Verification and Temporal Grounding. It evaluates not only correctness but consistency across viewpoints. Our analysis reveals two critical limitations of existing Video-LLMs: (1) models often fail to maintain consistency, with results far worse than their single-view performances. (2) When naively finetuned with synchronized videos of both viewpoints, the models show improved consistency but often underperform those trained on a single view. For improvements, we propose View-GRPO, a novel reinforcement learning framework that effectively strengthens view-specific temporal reasoning while encouraging consistent comprehension across viewpoints. Our method demonstrates its superiority over naive SFT and GRPO, especially for improving cross-view consistency. All resources will be made publicly available.

Recent advances in vision-language models have significantly propelled video understanding. Existing datasets and tasks, however, have notable limitations. Most datasets are confined to short videos with limited events and narrow narratives. For example, datasets with instructional and egocentric videos often document the activities of one person in a single scene. Although some movie datasets offer richer content, they are often limited to short-term tasks, lack publicly available videos and frequently encounter data leakage given the use of movie forums and other resources in LLM training. To address the above limitations, we propose the Short Film Dataset (SFD) with 1,078 publicly available amateur movies, a wide variety of genres and minimal data leakage issues. SFD offers long-term story-oriented video tasks in the form of multiple-choice and open-ended question answering. Our extensive experiments emphasize the need for long-term reasoning to solve SFD tasks. Notably, we find strong signals in movie transcripts leading to the on-par performance of people and LLMs. We also show significantly lower performance of current models compared to people when using vision data alone.

We introduce Ego4D, a massive-scale egocentric video dataset and benchmark suite. It offers 3,670 hours of daily-life activity video spanning hundreds of scenarios (household, outdoor, workplace, leisure, etc.) captured by 931 unique camera wearers from 74 worldwide locations and 9 different countries. The approach to collection is designed to uphold rigorous privacy and ethics standards with consenting participants and robust de-identification procedures where relevant. Ego4D dramatically expands the volume of diverse egocentric video footage publicly available to the research community. Portions of the video are accompanied by audio, 3D meshes of the environment, eye gaze, stereo, and/or synchronized videos from multiple egocentric cameras at the same event. Furthermore, we present a host of new benchmark challenges centered around understanding the first-person visual experience in the past (querying an episodic memory), present (analyzing hand-object manipulation, audio-visual conversation, and social interactions), and future (forecasting activities). By publicly sharing this massive annotated dataset and benchmark suite, we aim to push the frontier of first-person perception. Project page: https://ego4d-data.org/

We introduce Ego-R1, a novel framework for reasoning over ultra-long (i.e., in days and weeks) egocentric videos, which leverages a structured Chain-of-Tool-Thought (CoTT) process, orchestrated by an Ego-R1 Agent trained via reinforcement learning (RL). Inspired by human problem-solving strategies, CoTT decomposes complex reasoning into modular steps, with the RL agent invoking specific tools, one per step, to iteratively and collaboratively answer sub-questions tackling such tasks as temporal retrieval and multi-modal understanding. We design a two-stage training paradigm involving supervised finetuning (SFT) of a pretrained language model using CoTT data and RL to enable our agent to dynamically propose step-by-step tools for long-range reasoning. To facilitate training, we construct a dataset called Ego-R1 Data, which consists of Ego-CoTT-25K for SFT and Ego-QA-4.4K for RL. Furthermore, our Ego-R1 agent is evaluated on a newly curated week-long video QA benchmark, Ego-R1 Bench, which contains human-verified QA pairs from hybrid sources. Extensive results demonstrate that the dynamic, tool-augmented chain-of-thought reasoning by our Ego-R1 Agent can effectively tackle the unique challenges of understanding ultra-long egocentric videos, significantly extending the time coverage from few hours to a week.

ENIGMA-51 is a new egocentric dataset acquired in an industrial scenario by 19 subjects who followed instructions to complete the repair of electrical boards using industrial tools (e.g., electric screwdriver) and equipments (e.g., oscilloscope). The 51 egocentric video sequences are densely annotated with a rich set of labels that enable the systematic study of human behavior in the industrial domain. We provide benchmarks on four tasks related to human behavior: 1) untrimmed temporal detection of human-object interactions, 2) egocentric human-object interaction detection, 3) short-term object interaction anticipation and 4) natural language understanding of intents and entities. Baseline results show that the ENIGMA-51 dataset poses a challenging benchmark to study human behavior in industrial scenarios. We publicly release the dataset at https://iplab.dmi.unict.it/ENIGMA-51.

Existing approaches to video understanding, mainly designed for short videos from a third-person perspective, are limited in their applicability in certain fields, such as robotics. In this paper, we delve into open-ended question-answering (QA) in long, egocentric videos, which allows individuals or robots to inquire about their own past visual experiences. This task presents unique challenges, including the complexity of temporally grounding queries within extensive video content, the high resource demands for precise data annotation, and the inherent difficulty of evaluating open-ended answers due to their ambiguous nature. Our proposed approach tackles these challenges by (i) integrating query grounding and answering within a unified model to reduce error propagation; (ii) employing large language models for efficient and scalable data synthesis; and (iii) introducing a close-ended QA task for evaluation, to manage answer ambiguity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which also achieves state-of-the-art performance on the QAEgo4D and Ego4D-NLQ benchmarks. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/Becomebright/GroundVQA.

This paper introduces BioVL-QR, a biochemical vision-and-language dataset comprising 23 egocentric experiment videos, corresponding protocols, and vision-and-language alignments. A major challenge in understanding biochemical videos is detecting equipment, reagents, and containers because of the cluttered environment and indistinguishable objects. Previous studies assumed manual object annotation, which is costly and time-consuming. To address the issue, we focus on Micro QR Codes. However, detecting objects using only Micro QR Codes is still difficult due to blur and occlusion caused by object manipulation. To overcome this, we propose an object labeling method combining a Micro QR Code detector with an off-the-shelf hand object detector. As an application of the method and BioVL-QR, we tackled the task of localizing the procedural steps in an instructional video. The experimental results show that using Micro QR Codes and our method improves biochemical video understanding. Data and code are available through https://nishi10mo.github.io/BioVL-QR/

Egocentric videos provide a unique perspective into individuals' daily experiences, yet their unstructured nature presents challenges for perception. In this paper, we introduce AMEGO, a novel approach aimed at enhancing the comprehension of very-long egocentric videos. Inspired by the human's ability to maintain information from a single watching, AMEGO focuses on constructing a self-contained representations from one egocentric video, capturing key locations and object interactions. This representation is semantic-free and facilitates multiple queries without the need to reprocess the entire visual content. Additionally, to evaluate our understanding of very-long egocentric videos, we introduce the new Active Memories Benchmark (AMB), composed of more than 20K of highly challenging visual queries from EPIC-KITCHENS. These queries cover different levels of video reasoning (sequencing, concurrency and temporal grounding) to assess detailed video understanding capabilities. We showcase improved performance of AMEGO on AMB, surpassing other video QA baselines by a substantial margin.

We introduce RynnEC, a video multimodal large language model designed for embodied cognition. Built upon a general-purpose vision-language foundation model, RynnEC incorporates a region encoder and a mask decoder, enabling flexible region-level video interaction. Despite its compact architecture, RynnEC achieves state-of-the-art performance in object property understanding, object segmentation, and spatial reasoning. Conceptually, it offers a region-centric video paradigm for the brain of embodied agents, providing fine-grained perception of the physical world and enabling more precise interactions. To mitigate the scarcity of annotated 3D datasets, we propose an egocentric video based pipeline for generating embodied cognition data. Furthermore, we introduce RynnEC-Bench, a region-centered benchmark for evaluating embodied cognitive capabilities. We anticipate that RynnEC will advance the development of general-purpose cognitive cores for embodied agents and facilitate generalization across diverse embodied tasks. The code, model checkpoints, and benchmark are available at: https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/RynnEC

Humans possess spatial reasoning abilities that enable them to understand spaces through multimodal observations, such as vision and sound. Large multimodal reasoning models extend these abilities by learning to perceive and reason, showing promising performance across diverse spatial tasks. However, systematic reviews and publicly available benchmarks for these models remain limited. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of multimodal spatial reasoning tasks with large models, categorizing recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and introducing open benchmarks for evaluation. We begin by outlining general spatial reasoning, focusing on post-training techniques, explainability, and architecture. Beyond classical 2D tasks, we examine spatial relationship reasoning, scene and layout understanding, as well as visual question answering and grounding in 3D space. We also review advances in embodied AI, including vision-language navigation and action models. Additionally, we consider emerging modalities such as audio and egocentric video, which contribute to novel spatial understanding through new sensors. We believe this survey establishes a solid foundation and offers insights into the growing field of multimodal spatial reasoning. Updated information about this survey, codes and implementation of the open benchmarks can be found at https://github.com/zhengxuJosh/Awesome-Spatial-Reasoning.

We present HourVideo, a benchmark dataset for hour-long video-language understanding. Our dataset consists of a novel task suite comprising summarization, perception (recall, tracking), visual reasoning (spatial, temporal, predictive, causal, counterfactual), and navigation (room-to-room, object retrieval) tasks. HourVideo includes 500 manually curated egocentric videos from the Ego4D dataset, spanning durations of 20 to 120 minutes, and features 12,976 high-quality, five-way multiple-choice questions. Benchmarking results reveal that multimodal models, including GPT-4 and LLaVA-NeXT, achieve marginal improvements over random chance. In stark contrast, human experts significantly outperform the state-of-the-art long-context multimodal model, Gemini Pro 1.5 (85.0% vs. 37.3%), highlighting a substantial gap in multimodal capabilities. Our benchmark, evaluation toolkit, prompts, and documentation are available at https://hourvideo.stanford.edu

We introduce PlayerOne, the first egocentric realistic world simulator, facilitating immersive and unrestricted exploration within vividly dynamic environments. Given an egocentric scene image from the user, PlayerOne can accurately construct the corresponding world and generate egocentric videos that are strictly aligned with the real scene human motion of the user captured by an exocentric camera. PlayerOne is trained in a coarse-to-fine pipeline that first performs pretraining on large-scale egocentric text-video pairs for coarse-level egocentric understanding, followed by finetuning on synchronous motion-video data extracted from egocentric-exocentric video datasets with our automatic construction pipeline. Besides, considering the varying importance of different components, we design a part-disentangled motion injection scheme, enabling precise control of part-level movements. In addition, we devise a joint reconstruction framework that progressively models both the 4D scene and video frames, ensuring scene consistency in the long-form video generation. Experimental results demonstrate its great generalization ability in precise control of varying human movements and worldconsistent modeling of diverse scenarios. It marks the first endeavor into egocentric real-world simulation and can pave the way for the community to delve into fresh frontiers of world modeling and its diverse applications.

Assembly101 is a new procedural activity dataset featuring 4321 videos of people assembling and disassembling 101 "take-apart" toy vehicles. Participants work without fixed instructions, and the sequences feature rich and natural variations in action ordering, mistakes, and corrections. Assembly101 is the first multi-view action dataset, with simultaneous static (8) and egocentric (4) recordings. Sequences are annotated with more than 100K coarse and 1M fine-grained action segments, and 18M 3D hand poses. We benchmark on three action understanding tasks: recognition, anticipation and temporal segmentation. Additionally, we propose a novel task of detecting mistakes. The unique recording format and rich set of annotations allow us to investigate generalization to new toys, cross-view transfer, long-tailed distributions, and pose vs. appearance. We envision that Assembly101 will serve as a new challenge to investigate various activity understanding problems.

We present Ego-Exo4D, a diverse, large-scale multimodal multiview video dataset and benchmark challenge. Ego-Exo4D centers around simultaneously-captured egocentric and exocentric video of skilled human activities (e.g., sports, music, dance, bike repair). 740 participants from 13 cities worldwide performed these activities in 123 different natural scene contexts, yielding long-form captures from 1 to 42 minutes each and 1,286 hours of video combined. The multimodal nature of the dataset is unprecedented: the video is accompanied by multichannel audio, eye gaze, 3D point clouds, camera poses, IMU, and multiple paired language descriptions -- including a novel "expert commentary" done by coaches and teachers and tailored to the skilled-activity domain. To push the frontier of first-person video understanding of skilled human activity, we also present a suite of benchmark tasks and their annotations, including fine-grained activity understanding, proficiency estimation, cross-view translation, and 3D hand/body pose. All resources are open sourced to fuel new research in the community. Project page: http://ego-exo4d-data.org/

With the recent advances in video and 3D understanding, novel 4D spatio-temporal methods fusing both concepts have emerged. Towards this direction, the Ego4D Episodic Memory Benchmark proposed a task for Visual Queries with 3D Localization (VQ3D). Given an egocentric video clip and an image crop depicting a query object, the goal is to localize the 3D position of the center of that query object with respect to the camera pose of a query frame. Current methods tackle the problem of VQ3D by unprojecting the 2D localization results of the sibling task Visual Queries with 2D Localization (VQ2D) into 3D predictions. Yet, we point out that the low number of camera poses caused by camera re-localization from previous VQ3D methods severally hinders their overall success rate. In this work, we formalize a pipeline (we dub EgoLoc) that better entangles 3D multiview geometry with 2D object retrieval from egocentric videos. Our approach involves estimating more robust camera poses and aggregating multi-view 3D displacements by leveraging the 2D detection confidence, which enhances the success rate of object queries and leads to a significant improvement in the VQ3D baseline performance. Specifically, our approach achieves an overall success rate of up to 87.12%, which sets a new state-of-the-art result in the VQ3D task. We provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the VQ3D task and existing solutions, and highlight the remaining challenges in VQ3D. The code is available at https://github.com/Wayne-Mai/EgoLoc.

Environment understanding in egocentric videos is an important step for applications like robotics, augmented reality and assistive technologies. These videos are characterized by dynamic interactions and a strong dependence on the wearer engagement with the environment. Traditional approaches often focus on isolated clips or fail to integrate rich semantic and geometric information, limiting scene comprehension. We introduce Dynamic Image-Video Feature Fields (DIV FF), a framework that decomposes the egocentric scene into persistent, dynamic, and actor based components while integrating both image and video language features. Our model enables detailed segmentation, captures affordances, understands the surroundings and maintains consistent understanding over time. DIV-FF outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in dynamically evolving scenarios, demonstrating its potential to advance long term, spatio temporal scene understanding.

Human activities are particularly complex and variable, and this makes challenging for deep learning models to reason about them. However, we note that such variability does have an underlying structure, composed of a hierarchy of patterns of related actions. We argue that such structure can emerge naturally from unscripted videos of human activities, and can be leveraged to better reason about their content. We present HiERO, a weakly-supervised method to enrich video segments features with the corresponding hierarchical activity threads. By aligning video clips with their narrated descriptions, HiERO infers contextual, semantic and temporal reasoning with an hierarchical architecture. We prove the potential of our enriched features with multiple video-text alignment benchmarks (EgoMCQ, EgoNLQ) with minimal additional training, and in zero-shot for procedure learning tasks (EgoProceL and Ego4D Goal-Step). Notably, HiERO achieves state-of-the-art performance in all the benchmarks, and for procedure learning tasks it outperforms fully-supervised methods by a large margin (+12.5% F1 on EgoProceL) in zero shot. Our results prove the relevance of using knowledge of the hierarchy of human activities for multiple reasoning tasks in egocentric vision.

With the surge in attention to Egocentric Hand-Object Interaction (Ego-HOI), large-scale datasets such as Ego4D and EPIC-KITCHENS have been proposed. However, most current research is built on resources derived from third-person video action recognition. This inherent domain gap between first- and third-person action videos, which have not been adequately addressed before, makes current Ego-HOI suboptimal. This paper rethinks and proposes a new framework as an infrastructure to advance Ego-HOI recognition by Probing, Curation and Adaption (EgoPCA). We contribute comprehensive pre-train sets, balanced test sets and a new baseline, which are complete with a training-finetuning strategy. With our new framework, we not only achieve state-of-the-art performance on Ego-HOI benchmarks but also build several new and effective mechanisms and settings to advance further research. We believe our data and the findings will pave a new way for Ego-HOI understanding. Code and data are available at https://mvig-rhos.com/ego_pca

Understanding multimodal signals in egocentric vision, such as RGB video, depth, camera poses, and gaze, is essential for applications in augmented reality, robotics, and human-computer interaction, enabling systems to better interpret the camera wearer's actions, intentions, and surrounding environment. However, building large-scale egocentric multimodal and multitask models presents unique challenges. Egocentric data are inherently heterogeneous, with large variations in modality coverage across devices and settings. Generating pseudo-labels for missing modalities, such as gaze or head-mounted camera trajectories, is often infeasible, making standard supervised learning approaches difficult to scale. Furthermore, dynamic camera motion and the complex temporal and spatial structure of first-person video pose additional challenges for the direct application of existing multimodal foundation models. To address these challenges, we introduce a set of efficient temporal tokenizers and propose EgoM2P, a masked modeling framework that learns from temporally-aware multimodal tokens to train a large, general-purpose model for egocentric 4D understanding. This unified design supports multitasking across diverse egocentric perception and synthesis tasks, including gaze prediction, egocentric camera tracking, and monocular depth estimation from egocentric video, and also serves as a generative model for conditional egocentric video synthesis. Across these tasks, EgoM2P matches or outperforms specialist models while being an order of magnitude faster. We will fully open-source EgoM2P to support the community and advance egocentric vision research. Project page: https://egom2p.github.io/.

Delving into the realm of egocentric vision, the advancement of referring video object segmentation (RVOS) stands as pivotal in understanding human activities. However, existing RVOS task primarily relies on static attributes such as object names to segment target objects, posing challenges in distinguishing target objects from background objects and in identifying objects undergoing state changes. To address these problems, this work proposes a novel action-aware RVOS setting called ActionVOS, aiming at segmenting only active objects in egocentric videos using human actions as a key language prompt. This is because human actions precisely describe the behavior of humans, thereby helping to identify the objects truly involved in the interaction and to understand possible state changes. We also build a method tailored to work under this specific setting. Specifically, we develop an action-aware labeling module with an efficient action-guided focal loss. Such designs enable ActionVOS model to prioritize active objects with existing readily-available annotations. Experimental results on VISOR dataset reveal that ActionVOS significantly reduces the mis-segmentation of inactive objects, confirming that actions help the ActionVOS model understand objects' involvement. Further evaluations on VOST and VSCOS datasets show that the novel ActionVOS setting enhances segmentation performance when encountering challenging circumstances involving object state changes. We will make our implementation available at https://github.com/ut-vision/ActionVOS.

Streaming video understanding requires models not only to process temporally incoming frames, but also to anticipate user intention for realistic applications like AR glasses. While prior streaming benchmarks evaluate temporal reasoning, none measure whether MLLMs can interpret or leverage human gaze signals within a streaming setting. To fill this gap, we introduce StreamGaze, the first benchmark designed to evaluate how effectively MLLMs use gaze for temporal and proactive reasoning in streaming videos. StreamGaze introduces gaze-guided past, present, and proactive tasks that comprehensively evaluate streaming video understanding. These tasks assess whether models can use real-time gaze to follow shifting attention and infer user intentions from only past and currently observed frames. To build StreamGaze, we develop a gaze-video QA generation pipeline that aligns egocentric videos with raw gaze trajectories via fixation extraction, region-specific visual prompting, and scanpath construction. This pipeline produces spatio-temporally grounded QA pairs that closely reflect human perceptual dynamics. Across all StreamGaze tasks, we observe substantial performance gaps between state-of-the-art MLLMs and human performance, revealing fundamental limitations in gaze-based temporal reasoning, intention modeling, and proactive prediction. We further provide detailed analyses of gaze-prompting strategies, reasoning behaviors, and task-specific failure modes, offering deeper insight into why current MLLMs struggle and what capabilities future models must develop. All data and code will be publicly released to support continued research in gaze-guided streaming video understanding.

Human perception of the world is shaped by a multitude of viewpoints and modalities. While many existing datasets focus on scene understanding from a certain perspective (e.g. egocentric or third-person views), our dataset offers a panoptic perspective (i.e. multiple viewpoints with multiple data modalities). Specifically, we encapsulate third-person panoramic and front views, as well as egocentric monocular/binocular views with rich modalities including video, multi-channel audio, directional binaural delay, location data and textual scene descriptions within each scene captured, presenting comprehensive observation of the world. Figure 1 offers a glimpse of all 28 scene categories of our 360+x dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first database that covers multiple viewpoints with multiple data modalities to mimic how daily information is accessed in the real world. Through our benchmark analysis, we presented 5 different scene understanding tasks on the proposed 360+x dataset to evaluate the impact and benefit of each data modality and perspective in panoptic scene understanding. We hope this unique dataset could broaden the scope of comprehensive scene understanding and encourage the community to approach these problems from more diverse perspectives.

We introduce an object-aware decoder for improving the performance of spatio-temporal representations on ego-centric videos. The key idea is to enhance object-awareness during training by tasking the model to predict hand positions, object positions, and the semantic label of the objects using paired captions when available. At inference time the model only requires RGB frames as inputs, and is able to track and ground objects (although it has not been trained explicitly for this). We demonstrate the performance of the object-aware representations learnt by our model, by: (i) evaluating it for strong transfer, i.e. through zero-shot testing, on a number of downstream video-text retrieval and classification benchmarks; and (ii) by using the representations learned as input for long-term video understanding tasks (e.g. Episodic Memory in Ego4D). In all cases the performance improves over the state of the art -- even compared to networks trained with far larger batch sizes. We also show that by using noisy image-level detection as pseudo-labels in training, the model learns to provide better bounding boxes using video consistency, as well as grounding the words in the associated text descriptions. Overall, we show that the model can act as a drop-in replacement for an ego-centric video model to improve performance through visual-text grounding.

Affordance, defined as the potential actions that an object offers, is crucial for robotic manipulation tasks. A deep understanding of affordance can lead to more intelligent AI systems. For example, such knowledge directs an agent to grasp a knife by the handle for cutting and by the blade when passing it to someone. In this paper, we present a streamlined affordance learning system that encompasses data collection, effective model training, and robot deployment. First, we collect training data from egocentric videos in an automatic manner. Different from previous methods that focus only on the object graspable affordance and represent it as coarse heatmaps, we cover both graspable (e.g., object handles) and functional affordances (e.g., knife blades, hammer heads) and extract data with precise segmentation masks. We then propose an effective model, termed Geometry-guided Affordance Transformer (GKT), to train on the collected data. GKT integrates an innovative Depth Feature Injector (DFI) to incorporate 3D shape and geometric priors, enhancing the model's understanding of affordances. To enable affordance-oriented manipulation, we further introduce Aff-Grasp, a framework that combines GKT with a grasp generation model. For comprehensive evaluation, we create an affordance evaluation dataset with pixel-wise annotations, and design real-world tasks for robot experiments. The results show that GKT surpasses the state-of-the-art by 15.9% in mIoU, and Aff-Grasp achieves high success rates of 95.5% in affordance prediction and 77.1% in successful grasping among 179 trials, including evaluations with seen, unseen objects, and cluttered scenes.

Robotic generalization relies on physical intelligence: the ability to reason about state changes, contact-rich interactions, and long-horizon planning under egocentric perception and action. However, most VLMs are trained primarily on third-person data, creating a fundamental viewpoint mismatch for humanoid robots. Scaling robot egocentric data collection remains impractical due to high cost and limited diversity, whereas large-scale human egocentric videos offer a scalable alternative that naturally capture rich interaction context and causal structure. The key challenge is to convert raw egocentric videos into structured and reliable embodiment training supervision. Accordingly, we propose an Egocentric2Embodiment translation pipeline that transforms first-person videos into multi-level, schema-driven VQA supervision with enforced evidence grounding and temporal consistency, enabling the construction of the Egocentric2Embodiment dataset (E2E-3M) at scale. An egocentric-aware embodied brain, termed PhysBrain, is obtained by training on the E2E-3M dataset. PhysBrain exhibits substantially improved egocentric understanding, particularly for planning on EgoThink. It provides an egocentric-aware initialization that enables more sample-efficient VLA fine-tuning and higher SimplerEnv success rates (53.9\%), demonstrating effective transfer from human egocentric supervision to downstream robot control.

Humans can easily understand a single image as depicting multiple potential objects permitting interaction. We use this skill to plan our interactions with the world and accelerate understanding new objects without engaging in interaction. In this paper, we would like to endow machines with the similar ability, so that intelligent agents can better explore the 3D scene or manipulate objects. Our approach is a transformer-based model that predicts the 3D location, physical properties and affordance of objects. To power this model, we collect a dataset with Internet videos, egocentric videos and indoor images to train and validate our approach. Our model yields strong performance on our data, and generalizes well to robotics data.

We present EgoExo-Fitness, a new full-body action understanding dataset, featuring fitness sequence videos recorded from synchronized egocentric and fixed exocentric (third-person) cameras. Compared with existing full-body action understanding datasets, EgoExo-Fitness not only contains videos from first-person perspectives, but also provides rich annotations. Specifically, two-level temporal boundaries are provided to localize single action videos along with sub-steps of each action. More importantly, EgoExo-Fitness introduces innovative annotations for interpretable action judgement--including technical keypoint verification, natural language comments on action execution, and action quality scores. Combining all of these, EgoExo-Fitness provides new resources to study egocentric and exocentric full-body action understanding across dimensions of "what", "when", and "how well". To facilitate research on egocentric and exocentric full-body action understanding, we construct benchmarks on a suite of tasks (i.e., action classification, action localization, cross-view sequence verification, cross-view skill determination, and a newly proposed task of guidance-based execution verification), together with detailed analysis. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/EgoExo-Fitness/tree/main.

Surgical tool detection is a fundamental task for understanding egocentric open surgery videos. However, detecting surgical tools presents significant challenges due to their highly imbalanced class distribution, similar shapes and similar textures, and heavy occlusion. The lack of a comprehensive large-scale dataset compounds these challenges. In this paper, we introduce EgoSurgery-Tool, an extension of the existing EgoSurgery-Phase dataset, which contains real open surgery videos captured using an egocentric camera attached to the surgeon's head, along with phase annotations. EgoSurgery-Tool has been densely annotated with surgical tools and comprises over 49K surgical tool bounding boxes across 15 categories, constituting a large-scale surgical tool detection dataset. EgoSurgery-Tool also provides annotations for hand detection with over 46K hand-bounding boxes, capturing hand-object interactions that are crucial for understanding activities in egocentric open surgery. EgoSurgery-Tool is superior to existing datasets due to its larger scale, greater variety of surgical tools, more annotations, and denser scenes. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of EgoSurgery-Tool using nine popular object detectors to assess their effectiveness in both surgical tool and hand detection. The dataset will be released at https://github.com/Fujiry0/EgoSurgery.

Most existing benchmarks for egocentric vision understanding focus primarily on daytime scenarios, overlooking the low-light conditions that are inevitable in real-world applications. To investigate this gap, we present EgoNight, the first comprehensive benchmark for nighttime egocentric vision, with visual question answering (VQA) as the core task. A key feature of EgoNight is the introduction of day-night aligned videos, which enhance night annotation quality using the daytime data and reveal clear performance gaps between lighting conditions. To achieve this, we collect both synthetic videos rendered by Blender and real-world recordings, ensuring that scenes and actions are visually and temporally aligned. Leveraging these paired videos, we construct EgoNight-VQA, supported by a novel day-augmented night auto-labeling engine and refinement through extensive human verification. Each QA pair is double-checked by annotators for reliability. In total, EgoNight-VQA contains 3658 QA pairs across 90 videos, spanning 12 diverse QA types, with more than 300 hours of human work. Evaluations of state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (MLLMs) reveal substantial performance drops when transferring from day to night, underscoring the challenges of reasoning under low-light conditions. Beyond VQA, EgoNight also introduces two auxiliary tasks, day-night correspondence retrieval and egocentric depth estimation at night, that further explore the boundaries of existing models. We believe EgoNight-VQA provides a strong foundation for advancing application-driven egocentric vision research and for developing models that generalize across illumination domains. All the data and code will be made available upon acceptance.

Object understanding in egocentric visual data is arguably a fundamental research topic in egocentric vision. However, existing object datasets are either non-egocentric or have limitations in object categories, visual content, and annotation granularities. In this work, we introduce EgoObjects, a large-scale egocentric dataset for fine-grained object understanding. Its Pilot version contains over 9K videos collected by 250 participants from 50+ countries using 4 wearable devices, and over 650K object annotations from 368 object categories. Unlike prior datasets containing only object category labels, EgoObjects also annotates each object with an instance-level identifier, and includes over 14K unique object instances. EgoObjects was designed to capture the same object under diverse background complexities, surrounding objects, distance, lighting and camera motion. In parallel to the data collection, we conducted data annotation by developing a multi-stage federated annotation process to accommodate the growing nature of the dataset. To bootstrap the research on EgoObjects, we present a suite of 4 benchmark tasks around the egocentric object understanding, including a novel instance level- and the classical category level object detection. Moreover, we also introduce 2 novel continual learning object detection tasks. The dataset and API are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/EgoObjects.

Short-term action anticipation (STA) in first-person videos is a challenging task that involves understanding the next active object interactions and predicting future actions. Existing action anticipation methods have primarily focused on utilizing features extracted from video clips, but often overlooked the importance of objects and their interactions. To this end, we propose a novel approach that applies a guided attention mechanism between the objects, and the spatiotemporal features extracted from video clips, enhancing the motion and contextual information, and further decoding the object-centric and motion-centric information to address the problem of STA in egocentric videos. Our method, GANO (Guided Attention for Next active Objects) is a multi-modal, end-to-end, single transformer-based network. The experimental results performed on the largest egocentric dataset demonstrate that GANO outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods for the prediction of the next active object label, its bounding box location, the corresponding future action, and the time to contact the object. The ablation study shows the positive contribution of the guided attention mechanism compared to other fusion methods. Moreover, it is possible to improve the next active object location and class label prediction results of GANO by just appending the learnable object tokens with the region of interest embeddings.

Human activity is moderated by norms. When performing actions in the real world, humans not only follow norms, but also consider the trade-off between different norms However, machines are often trained without explicit supervision on norm understanding and reasoning, especially when the norms are grounded in a physical and social context. To improve and evaluate the normative reasoning capability of vision-language models (VLMs), we present EgoNormia |epsilon|, consisting of 1,853 ego-centric videos of human interactions, each of which has two related questions evaluating both the prediction and justification of normative actions. The normative actions encompass seven categories: safety, privacy, proxemics, politeness, cooperation, coordination/proactivity, and communication/legibility. To compile this dataset at scale, we propose a novel pipeline leveraging video sampling, automatic answer generation, filtering, and human validation. Our work demonstrates that current state-of-the-art vision-language models lack robust norm understanding, scoring a maximum of 45% on EgoNormia (versus a human bench of 92%). Our analysis of performance in each dimension highlights the significant risks of safety, privacy, and the lack of collaboration and communication capability when applied to real-world agents. We additionally show that through a retrieval-based generation method, it is possible to use EgoNomia to enhance normative reasoning in VLMs.