While video large language models (Video-LLMs) excel in understanding slow-paced, real-world egocentric videos, their capabilities in high-velocity, information-dense virtual environments remain under-explored. Existing benchmarks focus on daily activities, yet lack a rigorous testbed for evaluating fast, rule-bound reasoning in virtual scenarios. To fill this gap, we introduce EgoEsportsQA, a pioneering video question-answering (QA) benchmark for grounding perception and reasoning in expert esports knowledge. We curate 1,745 high-quality QA pairs from professional matches across 3 first-person shooter games via a scalable six-stage pipeline. These questions are structured into a two-dimensional decoupled taxonomy: 11 sub-tasks in the cognitive capability dimension (covering perception and reasoning levels) and 6 sub-tasks in the esports knowledge dimension. Comprehensive evaluations of state-of-the-art Video-LLMs reveal that current models still fail to achieve satisfactory performance, with the best model only 71.58%. The results expose notable gaps across both axes: models exhibit stronger capabilities in basic visual perception than in deep tactical reasoning, and they grasp overall macro-progression better than fine-grained micro-operations. Extensive ablation experiments demonstrate the intrinsic weaknesses of current Video-LLM architectures. Further analysis suggests that our dataset not only reveals the connections between real-world and virtual egocentric domains, but also offers guidance for optimizing downstream esports applications, thereby fostering the future advancement of Video-LLMs in various egocentric environments.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Examples from EgoEsportsQA. The benchmark requires high-frequency visual perception (left) and expert tactical reasoning (right). Each question has a time anchor for target events, organized by our two-dimensional taxonomy.
Benchmarks
Domain
Anno.
#Clips
#QAs
Len.
EgoVQA ( 2019 )
Indoor, Daily
M
∼ 120
∼ 120
∼ 60s
EgoTaskQA ( 2022 )
Indoor, Daily
A&M
∼ 400
∼ 8,000
25s
AssistQ ( 2022 )
Instructional
M
20
106
115s
EgoSchema ( 2023 )
Human Activity
A&M
5,063
5,063
180s
EgoLifeQA ( 2025 )
Daily Life
A&M
644
3,000
∼ 4.3h
EgoMemoria ( 2025 )
Daily, Instructional
A
629
7,026
-
Table 1: Comparison with representative egocentric video QA benchmarks, including task domain, annotation method (M: manual, A: automatic), number of clips (#Clips), number of QAs (#QAs), and average clip duration (Len.).
Figure 2: The six-stage data construction pipeline of EgoEsportsQA.
Figure 3: Statistical overview of the EgoEsportsQA benchmark. The dataset is systematically categorized along a two-dimensional decoupled taxonomy: the Cognitive Capability dimension (left) and the Esports Knowledge dimension (middle). The rightmost donut chart illustrates the balanced distribution of the 1,745 QA pairs across 3 representative FPS titles.
Models
Params
Counter-Strike 2 (%)
Valorant (%)
Overwatch 2 (%)
Overall (%)
Perc.
Reas.
Perc.
Reas.
Perc.
Reas.
Perc.
Reas.
Total
Closed-source Video-LLMs
Gemini 3 Flash ( 2025 )
-
70.09
43.33
47.33
33.69
50.54
42.91
56.66
40.81
49.74
GPT-5 ( 2025 )
-
82.05
66.00
71.76
70.05
68.92
68.73
74.36
67.98
71.58
Claude-Sonnet-4.5 ( 2025 )
-
65.24
45.33
54.20
50.80
46.76
46.91
55.34
47.24
51.81
Doubao-Seed-1.8 ( 2025 )
-
73.79
56.33
61.45
55.61
60.81
55.64
65.62
55.91
61.38
Table 2: Main evaluation results of 9 Video-LLMs on EgoEsportsQA. Perc. : Perception Level; Reas. : Reasoning Level.
Figure 4: Performance breakdown of 8 Video-LLMs across the cognitive capability and esports knowledge dimensions.
Modality
Overall Score (%)
Text
Visual
Audio
Perception
Reasoning
Total
✓
✗
✗
24.01
25.07
24.47
✓
✓
✗
56.66
40.81
49.47
✓
✓
✓
57.27
49.74
53.98
Table 3: Ablation study on different input modalities (Text, Visual, Audio). “Visual” refers to image sequences.
Sampling Rate
Perception
Reasoning
Total
0.5 fps
49.24
38.58
44.58
1.0 fps
56.66
40.81
49.74
2.0 fps
46.19
39.11
43.09
Table 4: Ablation study on video frame sampling rates.
Resolution
Perception
Reasoning
Total
256 × 144
30.52
30.05
30.32
640 × 360
47.41
36.48
42.64
1280 × 720
56.66
40.81
49.74
1920 × 1080
50.76
36.48
44.53
Table 5: Ablation study on input spatial resolutions.
Context Window
Perception
Reasoning
Total
Local ( [tbegin,tend] )
62.36
46.85
55.59
Expanded ( ±5 s margin)
63.48
46.98
56.28
Global (Full Video)
56.66
40.81
49.74
Table 6: Ablation study on the scope of temporal context windows.
Model
EgoEsportsQA-CS2 (%)
MVBench (%)
Perc.
Reas.
Total
Ego. Nav.
Qwen3-VL-8B
68.66
42.00
56.37
33.50
+ CS2 Data
69.80
45.67
58.68
36.00
Table 7: Performance of Qwen3-VL-8B before and after fine-tuning on CS2 data, demonstrating virtual-to-real transferability on MVBench Egocentric Navigation ( Ego. Nav. ) task.
Table 8: Head-to-head win rates (%) for commentary generation on 50 CS2 match clips, evaluated via LLM-as-a-judge (GPT-4o). Each cell represents the win rate of the row model against the column model.
We introduce EgoSAT, the first comprehensive benchmark for egocentric video reasoning in streaming settings, designed to evaluate the capabilities of modern vision-language models (VLMs). The benchmark targets streaming interaction understanding, where video frames arrive sequentially and models must continuously interpret evolving visual context. EgoSAT unifies several previously distinct tasks within a single streaming framework. In this formulation, queries about completed events correspond to retrospective reasoning, queries about ongoing activities require online understanding, and queries about future actions involve prospective anticipation. This unified setting requires models to reason about the past, present, and future while operating under the constraint that only previously observed frames are available. EgoSAT contains 1,997 unique videos spanning 165 hours of egocentric footage and around 4,800 high-quality question-answer pairs, carefully designed to probe reasoning across varying temporal contexts. Using this benchmark, we evaluate a diverse set of both open-weight and closed-weight VLMs, providing a systematic assessment of their ability for streaming interaction understanding. By distinguishing answerability and conducting diagnostics on confidence of models, we find existing models not only struggle with prospective and retrospective modeling, but also exhibit severe mis-calibration: confidence often fails to track inherent answerability, leading to dangerous "confidently wrong" behaviors. Project page: https://leiyj23.github.io/EgoSAT/
Yijia Lei, Jinzhao Li, Yichi Zhang +3
College of AI, Tsinghua University · University of Wisconsin–Madison
Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have yielded promising performance on Video Question Answering (VideoQA). Nevertheless, existing benchmarks are predominantly evaluated through answer correctness, while the faithfulness of predicted evidence supporting those answers remains insufficiently evaluated. This disconnect between answer generation and evidence verification motivates the construction of the Evidence-Grounded Video Question Answering Benchmark (EG-VQA), a large-scale open-ended benchmark in which each QA pair is annotated with temporally localized textual evidence, requiring models to jointly produce answers and verifiable evidence. EG-VQA comprises 2,067 videos and 11,838 QA pairs with fine-grained evidence annotations. To evaluate predicted evidence, Evidence-Grounded F1 (EG-F1) is introduced as a metric that jointly measures temporal alignment and semantic consistency between predicted and ground-truth evidence. Experiments reveal a substantial discrepancy between answer correctness and evidence faithfulness: even strong proprietary models can achieve high answer accuracy while exhibiting gaps in temporal-semantic grounding. To investigate evidence-aware learning under EG-VQA, we develop EG-Reasoner, an evidence-aware model trained with explicit evidence supervision. EG-Reasoner achieves strong evidence grounding performance among open-source models while maintaining competitive answer generation results compared with proprietary systems. These findings highlight the importance of explicitly modeling evidence grounding and suggest that evidence-aware supervision provides an effective direction toward more reliable and interpretable VideoQA systems.
Linpeng Huang, Weixing Chen, Zexin Chen +2
Sun Yat-sen University · Shenzhen University · Peng Cheng Laboratory
Video reasoning models are a core component of egocentric and embodied agents. However, standard benchmarks for assessing models provide only evaluation of the output (e.g. the answer to a question), without evaluation of intermediate reasoning steps, and most provide answers only in the text domain. We introduce Minerva-Ego, a benchmark for evaluating complex egocentric visual reasoning. We extend recent high-quality video data sources recorded from egocentric / embodied settings with a set of challenging, multi-step multimodal questions and spatiotemporally-dense human-annotated reasoning traces. Benchmarking experiments show that state-of-the-art models still have a large gap to human performance. To investigate this gap in detail, we annotate each reasoning trace in the dataset with the objects of interest required to solve the question, as spatiotemporal mask annotations. Through extensive evaluations, we identify that prompting frontier models with hints of 'where' and 'when' to look yields substantial improvements in performance. Minerva-Ego can be downloaded at https://github.com/google-deepmind/neptune.