Ego-Grounding for Personalized Question-Answering in Egocentric Videos
Organizations: University of Science and Technology of China · National University of Singapore
Abstract
We present the first systematic analysis of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in personalized question-answering requiring ego-grounding - the ability to understand the camera-wearer in egocentric videos. To this end, we introduce MyEgo, the first egocentric VideoQA dataset designed to evaluate MLLMs' ability to understand, remember, and reason about the camera wearer. MyEgo comprises 541 long videos and 5K personalized questions asking about "my things", "my activities", and "my past". Benchmarking reveals that competitive MLLMs across variants, including open-source vs. proprietary, thinking vs. non-thinking, small vs. large scales all struggle on MyEgo. Top closed- and open-source models (e.g., GPT-5 and Qwen3-VL) achieve only~46% and 36% accuracy, trailing human performance by near 40% and 50% respectively. Surprisingly, neither explicit reasoning nor model scaling yield consistent improvements. Models improve when relevant evidence is explicitly provided, but gains drop over time, indicating limitations in tracking and remembering "me" and "my past". These findings collectively highlight the crucial role of ego-grounding and long-range memory in enabling personalized QA in egocentric videos. We hope MyEgo and our analyses catalyze further progress in these areas for egocentric personalized assistance. Data and code are available at https://github.com/Ryougetsu3606/MyEgo
Figures & tables
| Benchmark | #Q | #V | Ave. Len | Challenges | MP | MO | Task |
| QAEgo4D [ 4 ] | 1,854 | 166 | 8.2 min | Episodic Memory | ✗ | ✗ | OE |
| EgoSchema [ 28 ] | 5,063 | 5,063 | 3 min | Long Ego Video Understanding | ✗ | ✗ | MC |
| EgoThink [ 6 ] | 700 | 595 | - | General Ego Vision Understanding | ✗ | ✗ | OE |
| EgoMemoria [ 47 ] | 7,026 | 629 | 0.5 to 60 min | General Ego Video Understanding | ✗ | ✗ | MC |
| EgolifeQA [ 46 ] | 6,000 | 6 | 44.3 h | Multimodal Episodic Memory | ✗ | ✗ | MC |
| EgoTextVQA [ 57 ] | 7,064 | 1,507 | 1.7 min | Ego Scene-Text Understanding | ✗ | ✗ | MC |
| Methods | Res. | Multiple-Choice | Open-Ended | |||||||||
| MC-2 | MC-5 | Cur. | Pre. | Avg. | Act. | Obj. | Others | Cur. | Pre. | Avg. (Acc/Score) | ||
| Human | - | 95.1 | 92.1 | 93.4 | 92.3 | 92.7 | 82.4 | 84.8 | 91.2 | 84.0 | 85.0 | 84.7 |
| Closed-source Models | ||||||||||||
| GPT-5 [ 29 ] | 480P | 66.4 | 53.7 | 56.9 | 55.8 | 56.1 | 50.0 | 44.6 | 43.1 | 51.1 | 44.0 | 46.1 / 2.5 |
| Gemini-2.5 Pro [ 8 ] | 720P | 61.8 | 45.5 | 49.0 | 48.4 | 48.6 | 40.2 | 40.2 | 47.7 | 42.4 | 40.3 | 40.9 / 2.2 |
| Open-source Models | ||||||||||||
| Models | Input | Acc@Cur. | Acc@Pre. |
| Qwen3-VL-8B-Think [ 2 ] | Uni. Q&A | 38.4 41.3 2.9 | 32.0 41.1 9.1 |
| Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct [ 2 ] | Uni. Q&A | 36.9 46.3 9.4 | 35.5 41.4 5.9 |
| InternVL3-8B [ 58 ] | Uni. Q&A | 35.6 41.3 5.7 | 34.8 40.4 5.6 |
| LLaVA-Video [ 55 ] | Uni. Q&A | 36.3 37.7 1.4 | 33.7 41.6 7.9 |
| Qwen2.5-VL-7B [ 3 ] | Uni. Q&A | 37.7 43.4 5.7 | 33.2 42.4 9.2 |
| Gemini-2.5 Pro [ 8 ] | Uni. Q&A | 42.4 49.3 6.9 | 40.3 51.5 11.2 |
| Models | Input | OE | MC |
| InternVL3.5-8B [ 41 ] | Original Enhanced Remove | 33.1 33.2 0.1 31.7 1.4 | 39.5 41.1 1.6 38.5 1.0 |
| InternVL3-8B [ 58 ] | Original Enhanced Remove | 35.0 34.7 0.3 33.7 1.3 | 41.8 40.4 1.4 41.4 0.4 |
| LLaVA-Video [ 55 ] | Original Enhanced Remove | 34.5 35.9 1.4 35.3 0.8 | 37.5 38.1 0.6 37.5 0.0 |
Appendix figures & tables6 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Methods | Multiple-Choice | Open-Ended | |||||||||
| MC-2 | MC-5 | Cur. | Pre. | Avg. | Action | Object | Others | Cur. | Pre. | Avg. | |
| Closed-source Models | |||||||||||
| GPT-5 [ 29 ] | 64.5 | 54.2 | 57.5 | 55.9 | 56.3 | 50.0 | 44.6 | 43.1 | 51.1 | 44.0 | 46.1 |
| Gemini-2.5 Pro [ 8 ] | 60.3 | 45.1 | 49.9 | 47.5 | 48.2 | 40.2 | 40.2 | 47.7 | 42.4 | 40.3 | 40.9 |
| General Open-source Models | |||||||||||
| Parameters > 10B | |||||||||||
| Task | General Prompt |
| Open-ended | You are a first-person AI assistant integrated into a head-mounted camera. Your primary mission is to answer questions from the user (the camera wearer) about their own actions, objects, and environment as seen through your lens. You should answer directly to the user. The question is asked at the moment of the last frame in the video. Key Instructions: 1. First-Person Context: All references to ’I’, ’me’, or ’my’ are about the user. You must distinguish between the user’s actions/objects and those of other people visible in the video. 2. Grounding: Base your answers primarily on the visual evidence in the video. If the information is not present or cannot be reasonably inferred from the video, state that it is not shown. 3. For any question that requires a ’Yes’ or ’No’ response, you MUST follow it with a brief explanation for your reasoning. 4. All responses must be direct and clear. {VIDEO_CONTENT}. Question: {QUESTION}. |
| Multiple-choice | You are a first-person AI assistant integrated into a head-mounted camera. Your primary mission is to answer questions from the user (the camera wearer) about their own actions, objects, and environment as seen through your lens. You should answer directly to the user. The question is asked at the moment of the last frame in the video. Key Instructions: 1. All references to ’I’, ’me’, or ’my’ are about the user. You must distinguish between the user’s actions/objects and those of other people visible in the video. 2. Base your answers primarily on the visual evidence in the video. {VIDEO_CONTENT}. Question: {QUESTION}. Options: {2/5 OPTIONS}. There is only one correct option. Please only response with the letter of the correct option. |
| Removed personalized cues | You are a first-person AI assistant integrated into a head-mounted camera. Your primary mission is to answer questions from the user (the camera wearer) about their own actions, objects, and environment. You should answer directly to the user. The question is asked at the moment of the last frame in the video. Key Instructions: 1. Grounding: Base your answers primarily on the visual evidence in the video. If the information is not present or cannot be reasonably inferred from the video, state that it is not shown. 2. For any question that requires a ’Yes’ or ’No’ response, you MUST follow it with a brief explanation for your reasoning. 3. All responses must be direct and clear. {VIDEO_CONTENT}. Question: {QUESTION}. |