ProactEgoMem: Benchmarking Proactive Memory in Streaming Egocentric Video
Organizations: LMU Munich · Technical University of Munich · Stanford University · Google
Abstract
Today's multimodal assistants are typically prompted to interpret the visual evidence presented to them. To offload the cognitive burden of remembering across long horizons, wearable assistants should instead proactively acquire and maintain useful memory as the user's surroundings evolve. Doing so on the user's behalf requires identifying what matters, understanding the scene in real time, and initiating memory maintenance in the background while the user stays focused on their activities. We introduce ProactEgoMem, a benchmark that evaluates proactive memory in streaming egocentric video. Three tasks ground the evaluation in ambient environmental needs: Information Capture (IC) preserves transient yet dense visual information, State Tracking (ST) follows changing object states, and Location Tracking (LT) records object movements. The benchmark defines its protocol at two levels of proactiveness: the Notification Level asks for a single timely notification that satisfies the user's intent, while the deeper Intervention Level asks the agent to maintain memory on the user's behalf through an active start-to-stop tool lifecycle. Parallel ProactEgoMem-Daily and ProactEgoMem-Sci tracks contain 300/100 clips covering daily and scientific use cases, paired with 1000/500 questions in ProactEgoMem-QA, which measures the quality of the proactively acquired memory. Across proprietary, open-source, video-language, and streaming baselines, even the strongest models fail to capture memory both timely and accurately. ProactEgoMem provides a rigorous evaluation foundation for proactive multimodal assistance and for video agents that co-exist with their users.
Figures & tables
| Task | Category | Question and candidates |
|---|---|---|
| IC | Text | What were the Rental Center hours on Sunday? a. 10a–4p b. 1p–6p c. 12p–5p d. 10a–6p |
| Sequence | What was the first packaged product likely to be? a. Bacon strips b. Olive oil c. Ham d. Mushrooms | |
| Attribute | What kind of oil did I pour into the frying pan? a. Sesame oil b. Canola oil c. Olive oil d. Sunflower oil | |
| Price | How much was the Pop Mandalorian item? a. 11 c. 10 | |
| Legibility | How readable were the Dominoes rules? a. Barely readable b. Written in large print c. Completely unreadable d. Clearly readable | |
| Direction | Which way did the sign point for Outdoor Center Rentals? a. To the left b. Back behind you c. To the right d. Straight ahead |
| Statistic | Value | Statistic | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unique clips | 300/100 | closed-ended | 924/1218 |
| Source videos | 239/100 | open-ended | 318/159 |
| Total clip len. | 16.00/6.47 h | Mean event len. | 31.82/13.33 s |
| Mean clip len. | 192.0/233.0 s | Median event len. | 13.47/4.77 s |
| Annotated events | 1242/1377 | Distinct objects | 292/89 |
| Task | Group | Model | Notification Level | Intervention Level | ||||||||||||
| Timing | Abs Error | Detection | Overlap | Timing | Abs Error | Detection | QA | |||||||||
| [email protected] | Prec | Recall | F1 | mIoU | [email protected] | Prec | Recall | F1 | Acc | |||||||
| IC | Proprietary | Gemini 2.5 Flash | 14.2 | 2.09 | 2.04 | 3.4 | 66.2 | 6.5 | 3.4 | 16.7 | 3.34 | 2.88 | 3.9 | 10.8 | 5.8 | 54.1 |
| GPT-5.4-mini | 17.0 | 1.70 | 2.09 | 1.3 | 65.6 | 2.6 | 2.0 | 5.3 | 3.83 | 2.22 | 5.1 | 6.9 | 5.9 | 52.5 | ||
| Open Source | Gemma4-31B | 11.8 | 2.16 | 2.25 | 6.1 | 62.8 | 11.1 | 4.5 | 8.6 | 3.01 | 2.71 | 3.0 | 37.9 | 5.5 | 66.5 | |
| Qwen3.8-27B | 14.9 | 1.70 | 1.85 | 3.2 | 74.8 | 6.1 | 5.6 | 20.0 | 2.50 | 2.64 | 5.9 | 10.8 | 7.6 | 62.7 | ||
Appendix figures & tables12 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Benchmark | Video Domain | Setting | Proactive | Multi-Level | Tool Lifecycle | Mem. QA | Ave. Dur. (s) | Response Type |
| Offline video QA | ||||||||
| Video-MME ( Fu et al., 2025 ) | General | Offline | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | 1018 | Multi-choice |
| LongVideoBench ( Wu et al., 2024 ) | General | Offline | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | 473 | Multi-choice |
| MLVU ( Zhou et al., 2025 ) | General | Offline | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | 930 | Multi-choice |
| EgoSchema ( Mangalam et al., 2023 ) | Egocentric | Offline | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | 180 | Multi-choice |
| HourVideo ( Chandrasegaran et al., 2024 ) | Egocentric | Offline | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | 2742 | Multi-choice |
| Task | Group | Model | Notification Level | Intervention Level | ||||||||||||
| Timing | Abs Error | Detection | Overlap | Timing | Abs Error | Detection | QA | |||||||||
| [email protected] | Prec | Recall | F1 | mIoU | [email protected] | Prec | Recall | F1 | Acc | |||||||
| IC | Proprietary | Gemini 2.5 Flash | 31.6 | 1.23 | 1.92 | 2.2 | 43.4 | 4.2 | 2.7 | 36.4 | 1.39 | 2.11 | 2.5 | 6.3 | 3.6 | 41.8 |
| GPT-5.4-mini | 30.1 | 1.28 | 1.94 | 1.6 | 47.4 | 3.2 | 1.9 | 20.0 | 3.41 | 3.56 | 4.6 | 5.7 | 5.1 | 46.5 | ||
| Open Source | Gemma4-31B | 21.4 | 1.36 | 1.71 | 4.0 | 48.0 | 7.4 | 5.4 | 13.6 | 2.43 | 2.75 | 2.0 | 25.1 | 3.8 | 57.2 | |
| Qwen3.8-27B | 22.8 | 1.39 | 1.63 | 2.4 | 52.6 | 4.7 | 3.7 | 46.2 | 0.93 | 1.49 | 5.9 | 7.4 | 6.6 | 55.9 | ||
| ST | IC | |
|---|---|---|
| Task line | You must decide whether to start tracking a state, stop tracking a state, or do nothing. | You must decide whether to start recording, stop recording, or do nothing. |
| Concurrency | Several state trackers may be active at the same time. | At most one recording may be active at a time. |
| Start tool | start_state_tracking(name: a short, specific name for the thing being tracked; state: a concise description of the state to track) | start_recording(name: a short, specific name for the information source; description: a concise description of what the recording should preserve) |
| Stop tool | stop_state_tracking(id: the tracking id of the active state tracker to stop) | stop_recording(): Arguments: {} -- the tool call has no arguments. |
| Policy | The user wants help avoiding accidentally leaving things in an unintended state during everyday activity. ... track relevant object states with the state-tracking tool. | The user seeks help in remembering information from their surroundings that may be useful in the future. ... build an ambient memory of the surrounding environment. Maintain broad coverage of relevant objects and their associated information. You should avoid both overly brief recordings and indiscriminate continuous recording. |
| Message style | "I decided to start/stop tracking a state because ..." | "I decided to start/stop recording because ..." |
| ST | IC | |
|---|---|---|
| Policy | The user wants help avoiding accidentally leaving things in an unintended state during everyday activity. ... notify the user about relevant object states. But do not notify about every single object or state unless it is relevant to the user intent. | The user seeks help in remembering information from their surroundings that may be useful in the future. ... notify the user about relevant objects and their associated information. But do not notify about every single object unless it is relevant to the user intent. |
| Message style | "You just ..." | "I can see ..." |
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