EgoActionBench: Benchmarking Dense Action Captioning for Egocentric Human Videos
Organizations: S-Lab, Nanyang Technological University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Abstract
Learning from human data offers a scalable path toward embodied intelligence, yet it requires models to accurately understand fine-grained human actions from egocentric observations. However, existing benchmarks remain limited in action atomicity, temporal precision, and hand-action association. We introduce EgoActionBench, a benchmark that represents continuous human manipulation as temporally localized atomic actions associated with the left hand, right hand, or both hands. EgoActionBench contains 1,407 episodes with 41,132 human-refined action annotations. To evaluate such dense predictions, we propose an evaluation protocol that retrieves temporally eligible candidates, selects a prediction by content agreement, and scores semantic fidelity and temporal overlap alongside action precision and recall, jointly capturing what happens, when it happens, and which hand performs it. We benchmark 20 baseline models and systems on EgoActionBench and further adapt two backbones, Qwen3-VL-4B and LLaVA-OneVision-2-8B, through supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning on automatically annotated training episodes. EgoAction improves EgoActionScore by 15.9 and 23.2 points on the two backbones, and both adapted models outperform all open-source baselines. Our experiments reveal substantial limitations of current models in action atomicity, temporal precision, and hand-action association, highlighting the gap between general video understanding and the action understanding required for embodied intelligence.
Figures & tables
| Dataset / Benchmark | Scene | Target unit | Ego. | Temp. loc. | Caption gen. | Hand-specific captions | Independent hand timelines | Structured caption scoring |
| ActivityNet Captions ( Krishna et al., 2017 ) | Real-world | Events | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| EPIC-KITCHENS-100 ( Damen et al., 2022 ) | Kitchen | Actions | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Ego4D ( Grauman et al., 2022 ) | Real-world | Narrated events | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Ego-Exo4D ( Grauman et al., 2024 ) | Real-world | Atomic descriptions | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| EgoYC2 ( Ohkawa et al., 2025 ) | Kitchen | Procedural steps | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| HD-EPIC ( Perrett et al., 2025 ) | Kitchen | Actions | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Source | Clips | Hours | Actions | Left | Right | Both |
| Ego4D | 451 | 3.130 | 16,774 | 6,825 | 8,349 | 1,600 |
| EgoLife | 485 | 2.676 | 13,306 | 5,895 | 6,109 | 1,302 |
| EPIC-KITCHENS-100 | 471 | 2.176 | 11,052 | 4,599 | 5,300 | 1,153 |
| Total | 1,407 | 7.982 | 41,132 | 17,319 | 19,758 | 4,055 |
Appendix figures & tables11 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Hyperparameter | SFT | GRPO |
| Optimizer | AdamW | AdamW |
| Learning rate | ||
| Learning rate scheduler | Cosine | Cosine |
| Learning rate warmup | 5% of training updates | 10 updates |
| Training batch size | 32 | 24 |
| Gradient norm clipping | 1.0 | 1.0 |
| Source | Episodes | Frame rate | Video resolution |
| Ego4D | 451 | 30 fps | , , , , or |
| EgoLife | 485 | 20 fps | |
| EPIC-KITCHENS-100 | 471 | 50 fps |
| Activity group | Episodes | Action captions |
| Kitchen and dining | 771 | 20,205 |
| Household and daily life | 230 | 6,783 |
| Construction and repair | 185 | 6,832 |
| Gardening and outdoor | 28 | 894 |
| Crafts and laboratory | 103 | 3,812 |
| Desk, devices, and leisure | 90 | 2,606 |
Egocentric Video Understanding
Egocentric video understanding studies how AI interprets first-person video to recognize actions, track interactions, reason about space and time, and assist users.
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