Anomalous Frame Detection by Grouping Frame Similarities between Two Videos Computed by Vision-Language Model to Extract Expert Workers' Unique Actions

Maintenance of critical infrastructures, such as railways and power plants, is essential for ensuring operational safety and reliability. However, the declining number of skilled maintenance workers highlights the need to transfer expert know-how to less experienced workers. Previous studies have attempted to extract candidates of expert knowledge by comparing videos of manual-based work with those of expert workers, mainly focusing on differences in observable actions. However, expert know-how is often embedded not only in actions but also in contextual decision-making during task execution. This paper proposes a method that detects anomalous frames between two task videos to automatically extract candidate scenes containing expert-specific actions and contextual decision-making scenes. The method generates frame-wise visual descriptions using a vision-language model (VLM). Expert-specific actions are extracted based on frame similarities computed from description comparisons between two videos, while contextual decision-making scenes are extracted using segment similarities derived from intra-video self-similarity of the descriptions. In simulated distribution board maintenance experiments involving 27 task scenarios, the proposed method achieved extraction rates of 65% for action candidates and 61% for decision-scene candidates, improving over conventional methods that achieved 59% and 33%, respectively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in discovering candidate scenes containing expert know-how.

To enable personalized, real-time coaching using Augmented Reality glasses or fixed camera setups in domains such as sports, cooking, or music, a system must understand not just what a person does, but how well they execute an activity. In an ego-exo video setting, this requires simultaneously detecting individual skilled actions and classifying each as correct or needing improvement, which Ego-Exo4D's proficiency demonstration benchmark formalized. We first adapt seven state-of-the-art temporal action detection architectures to this task, extend the evaluation protocol to disentangle detection from grading, and show that existing methods grade near-randomly. We then introduce SkillSpotter, a pose-aware multi-view architecture that jointly detects and grades skilled actions through three task-specific modules: (1) adaptive temporal suppression to handle the varying density of skilled actions across diverse activities, (2) gated 3D body pose fusion to leverage body kinematics as a complementary signal to visual features, and (3) bidirectional cross-view attention to combine ego and exo views effectively. SkillSpotter improves class-specific mAP from 12.40 to 21.82 (+76%) and balanced accuracy from 55.99% to 60.40% over the best baseline. SkillSpotter's modules transfer to other temporal action detection models with consistent gains, and our method generalizes beyond Ego-Exo4D to HoloAssist. Code: https://github.com/eth-siplab/SkillSpotter

Long-Video Question Answering (LVQA) requires locating decisive evidence in hour-scale videos under a limited frame budget. Most training-free methods apply the same frame-selection strategy to all questions, despite substantial variation in the evidence required by different question types. Our analysis shows that the relative effectiveness of frame-selection strategies varies across semantic categories and benchmarks, motivating adaptive evidence acquisition. In this paper, we introduce AutoSkill, a source-supervised framework for automatically discovering and routing executable frame-selection skills. Starting from a small labelled source pool, LLM agents iteratively propose, implement, evaluate, and refine candidate skills. For a target benchmark, AutoSkill uses only unlabelled question and option text to induce a shared semantic taxonomy, rewrite labelled source examples into the target style, and estimate a category-to-skill mapping. Neither target videos nor target answers are used in this process. At inference time, each question is assigned one skill, which selects the frames used in a single inference of the frozen video MLLM. Across five long-video benchmark splits, AutoSkill improves Qwen2.5-VL-7B and Qwen3.5-4B by 2.4% and 1.2%, respectively, demonstrating the effectiveness of our AutoSkill.