Egocentric Video Understanding

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15 papers in the last four weeks, up 150% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 140

Jun 17, 2026cs.CV

Hand-4DGS: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting for 4D Hand Reconstruction from Egocentric Videos

Dynamic 3D hand reconstruction from egocentric videos is essential for next-generation computing platforms such as AR/VR and AI glasses. Despite its importance, most prior works focus either on multi-view 3D hand reconstruction or on 4D human body reconstruction. Egocentric 4D hand reconstruction remains difficult due to rapid hand and camera motion, hand-object and inter-hand interactions, and inherent ambiguity from single-view observations. To address these challenges, we introduce Hand-4DGS, a feed-forward framework for dynamic 4D hand reconstruction from egocentric videos. Our approach incorporates a mesh-guided representation for structural priors and temporal convolutions to model dynamic motion. We evaluate our framework on H2O and ARCTIC, two egocentric hand-object interaction datasets, and show improvements over baselines. Our model can efficiently adapt to unseen videos from datasets that are not included in training. In addition, image supervision through differentiable Gaussian rasterization provides an additional signal for appearance optimization and pose adjustment during training and test-time optimization, without ground-truth 3D hand pose annotations.

Jeongmin Bae, Seoha Kim, Marc Pollefeys +3

Yonsei University · Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute · ETH Zurich +2

3D Gaussian Splatting 4D Reconstruction 3D Hand Pose Estimation 3D Reconstruction Egocentric Video Understanding Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction

Jun 16, 2026cs.CV

EgoCS-400K: An Egocentric Gameplay Dataset for World Models

The shift from video generation to interactive world modeling places new demands on data: beyond captioned videos, world models require temporally aligned video-action-language trajectories grounded in the actions, camera motion, states, and events that drive future scene changes. However, such data is difficult to obtain at scale. Web video datasets offer broad visual coverage but lack executable actions and reliable states; robotic datasets provide action and state supervision but are costly and limited in scene diversity; and existing simulators often lack large-scale human-driven interaction trajectories. In this paper, we introduce EgoCS-400K, a large-scale replay-grounded egocentric Counter-Strike dataset for world models, built from public professional CS and CS2 match demos that preserve human gameplay trajectories and enable parsing, replaying, rendering, and temporal alignment. We extract player states, view directions, movements, keyboard/button inputs, view-angle changes, weapon usage, game events, and round-level context, and render clean first-person videos from the same trajectories. EgoCS-400K contains over 400,000 first-person videos and 10,000 hours of gameplay from more than 1,000 matches and 40,000 rounds, covering 13 maps and 10 player viewpoints per round. It supports a range of interactive visual modeling tasks, including action-conditioned future prediction, state- and event-aware scene rollout, replay-grounded captioning, and agent egocentric action understanding. By connecting visual observations with human actions, camera motion, game states, and events at scale, EgoCS-400K serves as a practical bridge between passive web videos, controllable game simulation, and costly real-world embodied data.

Rongjin Guo, Dong Liang, Yuhao Liu +4

City University of Hong Kong

World Model Learning Egocentric Video Understanding Interactive World Models

Jun 16, 2026cs.CV

Divide, Deliberate, Decide: A Multi-Agent Framework for Fine-Grained Egocentric Action Recognition

Fine-grained action recognition in egocentric video is challenging for Vision-Language Models (VLMs): actions often differ only in small visual cues, and a single model tends to be biased toward a subset of these cues. We propose Divide, Deliberate, Decide, a fully-local, zero-shot multi-agent framework in which (i) a VLM orchestrator chunks the video and proposes a top-k candidate label list per segment, (ii) an ensemble of heterogeneous VLM specialists, drawn from different open model families, engages in a structured deliberation that includes a peer-consultation round of questions, and (iii) agent rankings are aggregated with a Borda count and the orchestrator re-ranks its own prediction in light of the specialists' evidence. The entire pipeline runs locally with no fine-tuning. Experiments show that our method positively improves zero-shot action recognition performance over the baseline, highlighting the influence of a heterogeneous deliberation step, showing that the gain stems from decorrelated model priors rather than from additional compute.

Alessandro Sottovia, Alessandro Torcinovich, Oswald Lanz

Faculty of Engineering, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

Zero-Shot Learning Multi-Agent Debate Egocentric Video Understanding Video Action Recognition VLM Reasoning

Jun 13, 2026cs.CV

From Frames to Temporal Graphs: In-Context Egocentric Action Recognition with Vision-Language Models

Action reasoning in egocentric video requires capturing fine-grained transitions of hand-object interactions, a task where general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle when operating directly on raw pixels. We propose to decouple visual perception from symbolic reasoning by converting videos into Temporal Action Graphs. In a multi-stage prompting pipeline, we first generate dense natural language narratives over short temporal windows as a semantic bottleneck, then formalize them into structured, open-vocabulary graph representations. On the EGTEA and Epic-Kitchens-100 datasets, the symbolic representation unlocks efficient in-context learning: few-shot graph demonstrations yield substantial accuracy gains over zero-shot frame and graph-based inference alike. Even in the zero-shot setting, graph-based reasoning remains competitive with pixel-based inference despite potential pretraining contamination favoring the latter. Across 11 open-weight VLMs from 6 model families ranging from 2B to 235B parameters, our findings indicate that current VLMs are more effective as symbolic reasoners than as direct visual observers. By projecting video into the language domain, we provide a scalable, fine-tuning-free alternative to end-to-end approaches that better leverages these models' latent reasoning strengths. The code will be made public.

Bessie Dominguez-Dager, Francisco Gomez-Donoso, Miguel Cazorla +3

University of Alicante · ETH Zürich · Microsoft

Egocentric Video Understanding In-Context Learning VLM Reasoning

Jun 13, 2026cs.CV

Keep It in Mind: User Centric Continual Spatial Intelligence Reasoning in Egocentric Video Streams

We introduce UCS-Bench, a dataset spanning 170+ hours of egocentric visual observations with 8.1K+ timestamped questions for diagnosing User-Centric Continual Spatial intelligence in egocentric video streams. UCS-Bench targets a new problem that emphasizes dynamic spatial reasoning, long-term memory, and their alignment with users' real-time locations. We propose DirectMe, a framework that incrementally constructs and maintains a structured spatial memory from streaming egocentric observations. DirectMe enables robust tracking and recall of object locations, all relative to the user's movement over time. By tightly coupling visual perception with memory updates and spatial reasoning, our approach supports long-horizon queries that require recalling interactions, resolving viewpoint-induced ambiguities, and adapting to dynamic scenes. Our experiments show that DirectMe significantly improves the spatial reasoning of leading multimodal LLMs; it also surpasses many spatially aware and long-form streaming video models. We hope our benchmark and solution will advance spatial intelligence research for egocentric AI assistants. Data and code are available at https://github.com/cocowy1/UCS-Bench.

Yun Wang, Junbin Xiao, Han Lyu +6

Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong · University of Science and Technology of China · National University of Singapore +4

Spatial Reasoning Benchmarks Streaming Video Understanding Egocentric Video QA Egocentric Video Understanding Spatial Reasoning

Jun 11, 2026cs.AI

Rethinking RAG in Long Videos: What to Retrieve and How to Use It?

Retrieval-augmented generation is moving beyond text into long, egocentric video, where systems must select query-relevant chunks across multiple modalities and temporal granularities. Yet progress in VideoRAG is limited by two gaps: existing benchmarks allow queries to be answered without the video, obscuring retrieval errors, and prior methods apply a single modality-granularity configuration per query, ignoring chunk-level variability. We address both by introducing V-RAGBench, a benchmark of

\langle

query, evidence chunk, answer

\rangle

triplets that enables faithful, decoupled evaluation of retrieval and generation, and CARVE, a simple method that runs parallel retrievers across configurations and employs chunk-adaptive reranking to identify the winning configuration for each chunk. Each chunk then enters the generator under its winning configuration selected during retrieval, yielding an interleaved evidence form where the chunk-level decision propagates across both stages. CARVE outperforms eight recent VideoRAG baselines, with the chunks supplied to the generator interleaving multiple configurations rather than sharing a single one, a behavior unattainable by query-level methods.

Yuho Lee, Jisu Shin, Nicole Hee-Yeon Kim +5

KAIST, YH, Seoul, Republic of Korea · Qualcomm AI Research, Qualcomm Korea, YH, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Multimodal RAG Egocentric Video Understanding RAG Evaluation Long-Video QA Video Retrieval

Jun 11, 2026cs.CV

Objects Before Words: Object-First Inductive Biases for Grounding Language in Child-View Video

Learning grounded word meaning from natural experience requires resolving two ambiguities in infant-view recordings: when the named referent appears and where it is in a cluttered frame. In SAYCam-style data, caregiver speech is sparse and weakly synchronized with egocentric video, so single-frame contrastive pairing yields noisy positives in which the intended object is absent or entangled with distractors. We propose BabyMind, an object-first bias for child-view contrastive learning under sparse, noisy supervision. BabyMind extracts candidate object embeddings using an offline mask-based region interface, links candidates across a short utterance-centered window into lightweight object files via tracking, and aligns utterances to bags of object files with a prototype-space multiple-instance contrastive objective. Track-coherence and global-object agreement regularizers stabilize learning and transfer object-file structure into the global frame embedding used at evaluation. On SAYCam-S, BabyMind improves Labeled-S 15 forced-choice accuracy by +2.6 points over CVCL and yields consistent gains on in-vocabulary out-of-distribution benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/sathiiii/BabyMind.

Sathira Silva, Abrham Kahsay Gebreselasie, Muhammad Umer Sheikh +3

Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, UAE · Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

Object-Centric Representation Learning Egocentric Video Understanding Vision-Language Grounding Child Language Acquisition Multimodal Contrastive Learning

Jun 10, 2026cs.CV

Reason, Then Re-reason: Cross-view Revisiting Improves Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning from egocentric videos is inherently challenging because the observable evidence is constrained by the camera trajectory. Existing methods rely on single-turn inference, forcing models to resolve geometric ambiguity through semantic priors rather than verifiable evidence. We argue that spatial reasoning should be revisitable: conclusions formed under limited evidence should remain open to revision when complementary viewpoints become available. Building on this insight, we propose Reason, then Re-reason (ReRe), a training-free, inference-time framework with two phases: in the Reason Phase, an MLLM forms a spatial hypothesis from the original video; in the Re-reason Phase, it verifies or revises the hypothesis by observing a synthesized novel-view video. To enable effective cross-view revisiting, we design a Geometry-to-Video pipeline that renders strategically complementary novel views from predicted 3D geometry. These views feature an elevated, oblique perspective with scene-spanning coverage, while preserving the MLLM's native video interface without architectural modifications. Extensive evaluations on VSI-Bench and STI-Bench demonstrate that ReRe substantially boosts open-source MLLMs to rival proprietary state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://zhenjiemao.github.io/ReRe/

Chaofan Ma, Zhenjie Mao, Yuhuan Yang +5

Cooperative Medianet Innovation Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Tongji University

Visual Spatial Reasoning 3D Spatial Reasoning Egocentric Video Understanding Visually Grounded Reasoning Spatial Reasoning

Jun 8, 2026cs.CV

Decoding Pedestrian Crossing Intention from Egocentric Vision via Vision Language Models

Egocentric vision offers a first-person view of human perception and decision making, yet its potential for traffic-safety prediction remains underexplored. In this work, we study the decoding of pedestrian crossing intentions from short egocentric video clips. We approach this by formulating the task as a closed-ended visual question answering (VQA) problem and leveraging vision language models (VLMs) to predict the pedestrians' intent. We first benchmark three families of state-of-the-art VLMs in a zero-shot setting, finding that they achieve moderate gains over random guessing but exhibit limited higher-level traffic reasoning. Motivated by these findings, we further adapt VLMs to the target task using parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our results show that the fine-tuned models substantially outperform their zero-shot counterparts and achieve a 9% accuracy improvement over a specialized transformer-based baseline. Finally, we demonstrate that incorporating additional contextual cues, including ego motion, vehicle motion, and eye gaze, further improves predictive performance. In particular, the fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-2B model guided by eye gaze and ego motion achieves a 14.5% accuracy improvement over the transformer baseline, establishing a new state of the art for egocentric pedestrian intent decoding.

Danya Li, Xiang Su, Yan Feng +1

Department of Technology, Management, and Economics, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark · Department of Computer Science and Department of Agricultural Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland · Department of Transport and Planning, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands

Pedestrian Intention Prediction VLM Adaptation Autonomous Driving Perception Egocentric Video Understanding

Jun 6, 2026cs.RO

EgoAERO: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from a Single Egocentric Video without Object Assets

Egocentric RGB-D videos offer a natural source of human dexterous manipulation demonstrations, but existing data is difficult to use for robot learning because object pose, geometry, and contact information are often missing or require pre-scanned object assets. We present EgoAERO, the first framework that learns dexterous manipulation from a single egocentric RGB-D human demonstration without object assets. EgoAERO reconstructs contact-consistent hand-object trajectories through asset-free object tracking and reconstruction, ego motion compensation, and adaptive contact optimization, then converts them into robot policies using two-stage residual learning. We further introduce an online quality assessment mechanism and construct EgoDex-R, a large-scale egocentric dataset with 4.3M RGB-D frames for dexterous policy learning. Simulation and real-world experiments show that EgoAERO enables single-demonstration dexterous manipulation and achieves downstream performance close to CAD-based reconstructions on HOI4D.

Yichen Niu, Haoran Lv, Xinrui Zhang +12

School of Astronautics, Harbin Institute of Technology · 2Lumos Robotic · 3Suzhou Research Institute, Harbin Institute of Technology +5

Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Egocentric Video Understanding Robotic Manipulation Robot Imitation Learning Robot Learning

Jun 5, 2026cs.CV

EgoPressDiff: Multimodal Video Diffusion for Egocentric UV-Domain Hand-Pressure Estimation

Estimating hand-surface contact pressure from an egocentric view is crucial for AR/VR devices, robotic imitation, and ergonomic analysis. Existing methods often discretize pressure signal and process frames independently, leading to quantization errors and temporal inconsistencies. We present \emph{EgoPressDiff}, a conditional video diffusion framework that generates UV-pressure maps from visual input. The core of our approach is a multi-modal conditioning strategy, introducing a PoseNet and a Vertex Encoder to efficiently extract features from hand pose and 3D mesh vertices. These signals, along with depth information, guide the generative process to ensure the pressure fields are physically grounded. To effectively fuse these heterogeneous features, we further propose a Distribution-Calibrated Spatial Layer, which aligns their statistical properties before combination. Evaluated on the EgoPressure ego-view setting, EgoPressDiff achieves state-of-the-art results, improving Volumetric IoU by over 34% relative to prior baseline, while reducing MAE and maintaining high temporal accuracy. Our project page is at https://egopressdiff.github.io/.

Yuan Zeng, Zilue Gao, Yujia Shi +3

Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, China · Harbin Institute of Technology, China · Pengcheng Laboratory, China

Video Diffusion Models Tactile Sensing Egocentric Video Understanding Multimodal Diffusion Models

Jun 4, 2026cs.RO

ActiveMimic: Egocentric Video Pretraining with Active Perception

Egocentric human video offers a scalable alternative to robot data for pretraining, yet models pretrained on such video consistently underperform those pretrained on robot data. We attribute this gap to a missing signal, the active perception behavior in egocentric videos, where humans continuously reposition their viewpoint during manipulation, inducing camera motion that standard pipelines treat as noise. To address this, we present ActiveMimic, a pretraining framework that recovers synchronized camera and wrist trajectories from a single body-worn RGB camera, models camera motion as a viewpoint action, and jointly learns active perception and manipulation from in-the-wild egocentric human video before adapting to a target robot. Empirically, real-world experiments across tasks with diverse active perception demands show that ActiveMimic consistently surpasses baselines pretrained on human video and matches state-of-the-art models pretrained on robot data. Further analysis provides evidence that active perception capability originates from egocentric human video pretraining rather than robot-specific fine-tuning, confirming active perception as the key to unlocking egocentric human video for robot pretraining.

Xingyao Lin, Guojin Zhong, Tianyi Lu +4

Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · Current Robotics +1

Active Perception Active Vision for Robot Manipulation Egocentric Video Understanding Robotic Manipulation Robot Imitation Learning

Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

Continual Visual and Verbal Learning Through a Child's Egocentric Input

Children learn the meanings of words from a continuous, temporally structured stream of egocentric experience. Recent work shows that neural networks can also learn word-referent mappings from a child's egocentric video recordings, but they cycle through the shuffled data for hundreds of epochs, contrasting with how children actually encounter their environment. We introduce BabyCL, a continual multimodal learning framework that processes the SAYCam dataset in a single chronological pass, combining streaming visual representation learning with an image-text contrastive objective. BabyCL combines a multi-stage temporal segmentation of the stream with a dual replay buffer that independently manages visual and multimodal histories, and it is jointly trained with three contrastive losses on a shared backbone. Under a matched optimization budget, BabyCL outperforms streaming learning baselines on the SAYCam Labeled-S 4AFC benchmark, substantially narrowing the gap to an upper bound of offline training. Ablations show that the gains are robust to the length of the online temporal segmentation window and the eviction rule of the replay buffer. Together, these results show that meaningful word-referent mappings can emerge under training conditions much closer to a child's actual experience.

Xiaoyang Jiang, Yanlai Yang, Kenneth A. Norman +2

Agentic Learning AI Lab, New York University · Department of Psychology, Princeton University

Egocentric Video Understanding Replay-Based Continual Learning Multimodal Contrastive Learning Multimodal Learning

Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

Plan, Watch, Recover: A Benchmark and Architectures for Proactive Procedural Assistance

We envision a proactive multi-modal assistant system which gives users real-time step-by-step guidance on a procedural task, autonomously deciding \textit{when} to interrupt, and \textit{how} to coach. However, progress is limited by the absence of large-scale, cross-domain benchmarks that reflect realistic conditions, particularly the common case in which users deviate from the expected step sequence. We address this gap with four contributions: \textbf{(1)}we release \textbf{EgoProactive}, a large-scale wearable-egocentric dataset for proactive procedural assistance with explicit Out-of-Plan (OOP) annotations and recovery steps; \textbf{(2)}we augment five established benchmarks (Ego4D, EPIC-KITCHENS, EgoExo4D, HoloAssist, HowTo100M) into \textbf{Pro\textsuperscript{2}Bench} under a unified proactive-guidance schema; \textbf{(3)}we propose a \textbf{decoupled planner--interaction architecture} specialized for procedural state, visual cues, and recovery injection; \textbf{(4)}~~we introduce a post-training recipe that transfers across model families, validated by cross-backbone replication on Llama~~4 and Qwen-3.6-VL. In extensive experiments, our trained Llama-4 system substantially improves objective intervention quality over strong proprietary baselines (Claude Opus4.6, Gemini3.1Pro, GPT~~5.2) and open-weight baselines (Qwen3~~VL~235B) baselines across all six datasets. Oracle-plan experiments further show that, when plan quality is controlled, the trained duplex model produces high-quality guidance and large gains on Out-of-Plan recovery.

Kaustav Kundu, Ritvik Shrivastava, Maxim Arap +13

1Meta Reality Labs · 2Meta Superintelligence Labs

LLM Planning Egocentric Video Understanding AI Agent Benchmarks Proactive Assistance Multimodal Agents LLM Agent Planning

Jun 2, 2026cs.CV

VLESA: Vision-Language Embodied Safety Agent for Human Activity Monitoring

As AI systems increasingly assist humans in physical tasks, ensuring safety becomes paramount -- physical actions carry immediate and irreversible consequences that digital errors do not. We introduce the Vision-Language Embodied Safety Agent (VLESA), a framework that monitors human activities from egocentric video and triggers real-time safety interventions when dangerous actions are predicted. VLESA addresses intent-dependent safety where identical actions can be safe or dangerous depending on context. A dataset pairing egocentric frames with goal-conditioned safety annotations is introduced, enabling a goal-conditioned safety Q-filter trained via GRPO that evaluates actions with respect to inferred intent without retraining. On top of that, an intent-action prediction agent is proposed to jointly infer goals and predict future actions from video. On the ASIMOV-2.0 benchmark, VLESA achieves higher intervention accuracy at the exact ground-truth frame compared to baselines, while the GRPO-trained Q-filter improves action safety by over 41 percentage points through goal-conditioned constrained decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/HanjiangHu/VLESA.

Hanjiang Hu, Yiyuan Pan, Jiaxing Li +5

Carnegie Mellon University · Harvard University · Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

Egocentric Video Understanding AI Agent Safety

Jun 2, 2026cs.CV

OVO-S-Bench: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Streaming Spatial Intelligence in Multimodal LLMs

Multimodal agents in robotics, AR, and autonomous driving must reason about places and layouts from continuous egocentric streams, often using evidence outside the current view. Existing benchmarks either evaluate offline over full videos or target events rather than spatial structure. We introduce OVO-S-Bench, a fully human-annotated benchmark for streaming spatial intelligence, comprising 1,680 questions over 348 source videos. Annotation involves 12 trained annotators, each also serving as a blind cross-reviewer, across roughly 804 person-hours of multi-round quality assurance. Each question carries a query timestamp and an evidence interval, and at evaluation, the model sees only the prefix preceding the query. Questions span four levels of increasing abstraction: instantaneous egocentric perception, spatiotemporal context tracking, spatial simulation and reasoning, and allocentric mapping. Across 38 proprietary and open-source MLLMs, Gemini-3.1-Pro trails human experts by 27 points, 59.2 vs. 86.6, with allocentric mapping as the dominant bottleneck. Notably, streaming and spatially fine-tuned MLLMs underperform their own backbones. We further find that chain-of-thought reasoning amplifies spatial errors when ungrounded in the stream. By exposing these limitations, OVO-S-Bench establishes a demanding testbed for next-generation streaming spatial MLLMs.

Yifei Li, Pengyiang Liu, Yuhang Zang +4

Tsinghua University · Shanghai AI Laboratory · Beihang University

Spatial Reasoning Benchmarks Spatiotemporal Reasoning Egocentric Video Understanding Multimodal QA Multimodal Model Evaluation Multimodal Understanding

Jun 1, 2026cs.CV

Hand Trajectory Fusion for Egocentric Natural Language Query Grounding

Egocentric Natural Language Query (NLQ) grounding asks a model to localize, in a long first-person video, the temporal interval that answers a free-form text query. Existing methods fuse video appearance with the query but ignore hand motion, despite the fact that roughly 41% of Ego4D NLQ queries are answered at a moment of hand--object manipulation or their immediate outcomes.We propose a hand-trajectory encoder for converting a sequence of hand skeletons into highly-semantic hand kinematic features, which are then aligned and combined with pretrained video--text features through a cross-attention fusion strategy with adaptive gating. On the Ego4D NLQ v2 validation split, the clearest gains appear for Hand-Object Interaction queries (+2.54 R1@IoU=0.3) and Quantity/State queries (+4.32 R1@IoU=0.3), indicating that hand trajectory provides grounding cues beyond appearance alone.

Enmin Zhong, Carlos R. del-Blanco, Fernando Jaureguizar +1

Grupo de Tratamiento de Im´agenes (GTI), Information Processing and Telecommunications Center , ETSI Telecomunicaci´on, Universidad Polit´ecnica de Madrid, Spain

Temporal Video Grounding Egocentric Video Understanding Multimodal Fusion

Jun 1, 2026cs.CV

Understanding-Enhanced Model Collaboration for Long-Tailed Egocentric Mistake Detection

In this report, we address the problem of determining whether a user performs an action incorrectly from egocentric video data. To this end, we propose an Understanding-Enhanced Model Collaboration Method (UE-MCM) that combines efficient coarse-grained video understanding with accurate fine-grained action reasoning. Specifically, UE-MCM contains a small model branch and a large model branch. The large model branch focuses on whether the fine-grained action itself is executed incorrectly, while the small model branch jointly takes the coarse-grained video and fine-grained segment as input to identify actions that may be locally correct but inconsistent with the overall workflow. The small model branch is built on a CLIP4CLIP video encoder initialized from a CLIP model enhanced by Diffusion Contrastive Reconstruction, and the large model branch uses the Qwen3-VL Embedding model to extract high-capacity representations from fine-grained action segments. The small-branch prediction and the large-branch prediction are then adaptively fused by a lightweight collaboration gate. To handle the long-tailed distribution of mistake instances, we optimize the classifiers with complementary objectives, including reweighted cross-entropy, AUC-oriented learning, and label-aware adjustment. The resulting system balances speed and accuracy, making it effective for detecting subtle, rare, and ambiguous mistakes in egocentric instructional videos.

Boyu Han, Qianqian Xu, Shilong Bao +3

State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, CAS · School of Computer Science and Tech., University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence +2

Egocentric Video Understanding Temporal Video Understanding

Jun 1, 2026cs.CV

3rd Place at CVPR 2026 CASTLE Challenge: Agentic Multi-View Long-Context Video Understanding via Hierarchical Knowledge Graph Retrieval

This paper presents our winning methodology for the CASTLE 2026 Challenge at the CVPR 2026 EgoVis Workshop, where our team secured third place globally. The challenge tasks participants with answering highly complex visual, spatiotemporal, and verbal questions, including visual counting, action localization, multi-view tracking and speaker temporal reasoning, within massive, multimodal video streams. The underlying dataset consists of over 600 hours synchronized footage captured by 15 ego and exo camera sources. To tackle the extreme scale and long-context demands of this environment, we introduce a training-free agentic framework optimized for long-form video understanding. Our framework introduces two core architectural components: i) a Video Knowledge Graph that maps static and dynamic entities, their temporal relationships, and intersecting events to enable multi-hop relational reasoning, and ii) an adaptive agentic workflow that resolves complex queries through a hierarchical retrieval and indexing. Empirical results demonstrate that our framework achieves high zero-shot reasoning accuracy on long-context multi-view streams. Our code will be released at https://github.com/RaghadKhaled/CASTLE-Challenge-Framework.

Raghad Albusayes, Munirah Alyahya

TAHAKOM

Video QA Egocentric Video Understanding Tool-Using Vision-Language Agents Long-Video Understanding Knowledge Graph Question Answering

May 30, 2026cs.CV

The Right Inference Strategy Is All You Need: Nearly Training-Free Domain-Wise Inference for EgoCross Challenge

EgoCross evaluates multimodal large language models on egocentric video question answering under substantial domain shift, where test videos come from surgery, industrial assembly, extreme sports, and animal-mounted cameras rather than ordinary daily-life scenes. In the source-limited track, the base model is fixed to Qwen3-VL-4B, while the official task-specific support set contains only 20 training samples. This setting makes the challenge less about model scaling and more about exposing the right visual, temporal, and answer-selection cues to a constrained model. Our key observation is that the frozen baseline model is not simply incapable of these rare scenarios; rather, it often fails to transfer its existing visual-language knowledge to the new task format without an appropriate interface. We therefore use a domain-wise inference strategy that treats the four target domains separately and designs different input, prompting, and answer-mapping procedures according to each domain's task characteristics. These strategies make the rare egocentric scenes more interpretable to the VLM by emphasizing the cues that matter for each domain. The resulting system is nearly training-free: surgery, and animal questions are answered with the base Qwen3-VL-4B model, while XSports and industry use only the official SFT checkpoint trained for two epochs on the provided 20 training samples. On the final evaluation, this simple strategy reaches 66.98% overall accuracy, suggesting that careful domain-aware inference can compensate for limited base-model strength and recover much of the ability already present in the baseline model.

Leyi Wu, Yifan Zhao, Jinjie Zhang +2

HKUST(GZ) · Knowin · HKUST

Egocentric Video QA Video QA Egocentric Video Understanding Cross-Domain Transfer Learning Multimodal Understanding VLM Inference

May 30, 2026cs.CV

CASTLE2026 Team WDL Technical Report

The CASTLE Challenge @ EgoVis 2026 evaluates long-form egocentric video question answering over 600+ hours of multi-perspective recordings. Each four-choice question requires evidence from videos, transcripts, auxiliary photos, people, days, rooms, and temporal context. We propose an evidence-aware multimodal reasoning pipeline based on Qwen. Our system parses question hints, retrieves ASR chunks, attaches auxiliary images, samples candidate video frames, and routes questions into static visual, speech/text, temporal, and mixed types with specialized prompts. Multiple inference passes are aggregated by confidence-weighted voting and converted into the official Codabench format. In ablation, LoRA improves the score from 0.21 to 0.50, and more sampled frames further raise it to 0.58. Our final system ranks first in the CASTLE Challenge @ EgoVis 2026.

Zhengyang Li, Zhenglin Du, Yi Wen +3

Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding

Multimodal RAG Egocentric Video QA Video QA Egocentric Video Understanding Multimodal Reasoning Long-Video QA

May 30, 2026cs.CV

FROST-STA: Frozen Dense Features for the Ego4D Short-Term Object Interaction Anticipation

Short-term anticipation in egocentric video requires more than recognizing the current scene: a system must infer which object the camera wearer will contact, which action will follow, and how soon the contact will happen. This report describes FROST-STA, our submission to the Ego4D Short-Term Object Interaction Anticipation (STA) Challenge at EgoVis 2026. For each query time, the model produces a ranked set of structured hypotheses containing an active-object box, noun label, verb label, time-to-contact (TTC), and confidence. FROST-STA builds on the V-JEPA 2.1 STA evaluation protocol, but adapts it to the challenge by using object-centric decoding, multi-head prediction, and a submission-oriented training and ensembling recipe. We keep the V-JEPA 2.1 ViT-G backbone fixed and extract two dense token streams: video tokens from a short clip resized to 384 pixels before the query, and image tokens from the last observed high-resolution frame. A compact alignment module, consisting of an attentive probe and frame-guided temporal pooling, maps the clip representation onto the spatial reference of the final frame before fusing it with image features. The fused maps are decoded by Faster R-CNN-style STA heads that estimate box offsets, nouns, verbs, TTC values, and interaction quality. For the final leaderboard entry, we train for 25 epochs with the official training split plus additional permitted validation annotations, and combine predictions across eight heads and checkpoints from epochs 15-25. FROST-STA obtains 5.13 Overall Top-5 mAP on the official test server, ranking second in the challenge and showing that frozen dense image-video features can serve as a strong basis for object-level interaction forecasting.

Chaoyang Wang, Lexuan Xu

Beihang University

Egocentric Video Understanding Temporal Video Understanding

May 30, 2026cs.CV

TAP-JEPA: Frozen Future-Latent Probing and Two-Stage Score Fusion for EPIC-KITCHENS-100 Action Anticipation

This report presents TAP-JEPA, our runner-up submission to the EPIC-KITCHENS-100 (EK-100) Action Anticipation Challenge at EgoVis 2026. The task is to anticipate the next verb, noun, and verb-noun action from an egocentric clip that ends before the target action begins. Instead of fine-tuning a large video backbone, TAP-JEPA builds a compact anticipation model on frozen V-JEPA 2.1 features: a ViT-G/384 encoder extracts visible pre-action tokens, the pre-trained latent predictor estimates near-future tokens from the observed context, and both token groups are fused by attentive probes with task-specific queries for verbs, nouns, and action pairs. For the final submission, we expand supervised training with the official training split and most of the validation split, reserving a small subset for sanity checks and qualitative inspection, and adopt a two-stage score fusion that first averages eight independently initialized probe replicas within each epoch and then merges candidates from epochs 12-20 with field-dependent weights. On the official open-testing leaderboard, our sunshinesky entry achieves 27.91 percent overall action Mean Top-5 Recall (MT5R), ranking second and only 0.04 percentage points behind the top score.

Chaoyang Wang, Lexuan Xu

Beihang University

Next-Action Prediction Egocentric Video Understanding

May 29, 2026cs.CV

Ego-METAS: Egocentric online Multimodal Energy-efficient Temporal Action Segmentation benchmark

To operate in the physical world, embodied agents must perceive their environment in an "always-on" fashion, selectively accessing the most informative sensors to balance energy constraints and task accuracy. Despite its importance for resource-constrained devices, energy-aware perception remains under-explored, with most prior work assuming unlimited compute. To address this, we introduce Ego-METAS: the first Egocentric online Multimodal Energy-efficient Temporal Action Segmentation benchmark. Ego-METAS provides a unified testbed of more than 100 hours of untrimmed egocentric video from EgoExo4D, CMU-MMAC, and CaptainCook4D, spanning 5 modalities (RGB, audio, gaze, IMU, and monochrome camera). We formulate an online temporal action segmentation task where models must dynamically select which sensors to activate at each timestep while strictly adhering to hardware-representative energy budgets. Alongside the benchmark, we release unified splits, cleaned annotations, pre-extracted features, and a diverse suite of baseline routing policies. Our evaluations show that optimal routing is highly scenario-dependent, and that existing policy-learning methods, designed primarily for trimmed clips, struggle to adapt to continuous, untrimmed environments. However, even simple dynamic fusion of complementary modalities (e.g., via random routing) proves critical for balancing predictive accuracy against strict energy budgets. Ultimately, Ego-METAS provides a standardized foundation to develop robust, cost-aware policies for autonomous, always-on embodied AI.

Maria Santos-Villafranca, Jesus Bermudez-cameo, Alejandro Perez-Yus +2

University of Zaragoza - I3A · Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Catania

Temporal Action Segmentation Energy-Efficient ML Egocentric Video Understanding Multimodal Sensor Fusion

May 29, 2026cs.CV

EGOSTREAM: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Streaming Episodic Memory in Egocentric Vision

Continuous episodic memory is a core capability for autonomous agents operating in dynamic, real-world environments, yet current streaming video benchmarks provide limited tools for diagnosing what models remember and for how long. We introduce Egostream, a diagnostic benchmark for streaming episodic memory evaluation in egocentric vision. \egostream organizes 2,250 curated questions along seven cognitive dimensions: detail, spatial, temporal, event, social, causal, and prospective memory. We introduce the Answer Validity Window (AVW), which specifies the temporal span an answer remains valid as the observed scene evolves. This allows us to expand the questions into 8,528 recall-conditioned evaluations, enabling controlled testing from instant to ultra-long-term recall while separating genuine model forgetting from natural world-state changes. We rigorously establish baseline performance through a unified streaming MLLM framework that compares several state-of-the-art memory-management mechanisms, covering sliding windows, attention sinks, KV-cache pruning, merging, and offloading. Experiments within a unified Qwen3-VL backbone reveal that comparable aggregate accuracies mask starkly different memory profiles. For instance, token pruning preserves fine-grained details and temporal structure significantly better than token merging, while quantized offloading rescues ultra-long-term recall. Ultimately, all mechanisms operate well below real-time (>1s per frame), and top performing methods ceil at about 45% accuracy, exposing critical gaps in current architectures. Egostream provides the diagnostic testbed needed to close these gaps. Project website, news and updates at: https://saroo25.github.io/Egostream/

Rosario Forte, Giuseppe Lando, Antonino Furnari

Department of Mathematics and Computer Science University of Catania

VLM Evaluation Streaming Video Understanding Episodic Memory Egocentric Video Understanding Memory Agent Benchmarks Agent Memory Management

May 29, 2026cs.CV

HiERO-StepG @ Ego4D Step Grounding Challenge: hierarchical activity understanding enables zero-shot step grounding

Procedural activities follow well-defined structures: whether we consider a cooking recipe or a mechanic repairing a car, these activities naturally decompose in a hierarchy of steps and sub-steps. Traditional approaches for step grounding require extensive annotations and scale poorly. Instead, we argue that such hierarchical structure can emerge naturally from uncurated videos of human activities through recurring patterns of co-occurring actions and activities. Our approach builds on HiERO, a weakly-supervised representation learning approach that maps close in the feature space actions that are functionally related to each other, leveraging only fine-grained action-level narrations. In this feature space, procedure steps can be detected by a simple clustering, with no additional task-specific fine-tuning. For the Ego4D Step Grounding challenge, we augment this approach by ensuring fine and coarse level agreement in step assignments, enforcing strict temporal monotonicity of the grounded steps and post-processing the detected steps to reduce the impact of noisy predictions. We call this approach HiERO-StepG and it achieves 56.27 % on the R@1 (IoU = 0.3) metric on the global leaderboard at submission time, ranking second while being completely zero-shot and not requiring procedure-specific annotations. Project page: https://github.com/andreazenotto/HiERO-StepG.

Andrea Zenotto, Simone Alberto Peirone, Francesca Pistilli +1

Politecnico di Torino

Temporal Video Grounding Zero-Shot Learning Egocentric Video Understanding

May 29, 2026cs.CV

WristCompass: Kinematic Coupling as a Learnable Visual Concept for Ego-Camera Orientation

Recovering ego-camera orientation from manipulation video is a prerequisite for disentangling hand motion from camera motion, a key step in imitation learning from egocentric demonstrations. The obvious approach, inferring orientation from scene geometry, fails when hands occlude the frame: VGGT, a 1B-parameter scene reconstruction model, scores worse than a constant predictor on the TACO benchmark. We identify an alternative visual concept that is present precisely when scene geometry is absent: kinematic coupling dynamics, the structured physical relationship between wrist motion and camera orientation imposed by the arm-shoulder-head chain. We find that this concept is compact (4D inter-wrist features outperform 126D full hand keypoints), temporal (requiring a GRU over short windows rather than per-frame retrieval), and physically grounded (transferring zero-shot across datasets because it is rooted in anatomy rather than scene appearance). Trained only on tabletop manipulation, WristCompass transfers zero-shot to Epic Kitchens cooking video, achieving 14.3

^\circ

median geodesic error and approaching the performance of a 1B-parameter scene model at 200K GRU parameters.

Varun Nair, Vidyut Baradwaj, Jiahang He +3

Camera Pose Estimation Egocentric Video Understanding Egocentric Vision

May 28, 2026cs.CV

Semantic and Visual Evidence for Efficient Long-Video Reasoning: A Solution for the HD-EPIC VQA Challenge

Understanding long-form egocentric videos remains challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to limited context length and insufficient grounding of fine-grained visual details. The recently proposed HD-EPIC benchmark highlights these limitations: even strong long-context models achieve relatively low performance across diverse video question answering tasks. In this paper, we propose a unified framework that decouples long-video reasoning into two complementary forms of evidence: semantic evidence and visual evidence. Semantic evidence captures global procedural structure through a coarse-to-fine extraction pipeline, while object-centric visual evidence preserves fine-grained grounding through bounding boxes and visual embeddings. During inference, we formulate reasoning as a query-conditioned evidence retrieval and integration process, dynamically selecting relevant information from both sources. Our approach achieves competitive performance in the HD-EPIC-VQA Challenge across multiple task categories. More broadly, our results demonstrate that explicitly structuring, retrieving, and integrating semantic and visual evidence is critical for effective long-video understanding with MLLMs.

Yinsong Xu, Wei Jing, Liuxin Zhang +2

Lenovo, China

Egocentric Video QA Video QA Egocentric Video Understanding Vision-Language Grounding Long-Video QA

May 27, 2026cs.CV

Reflective Dialogue between Teacher and Solver Agents for Video Question Answering

Various approaches have been proposed to adapt Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to specialized domains for Video Question Answering, including fine-tuning and in-context learning. However, acquiring task-specific knowledge at the inference phase from only a small labeled support set without fine-tuning remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a method that achieves adaptation solely through inference-time context injection. Our method first constructs a Reflective Dialogue (RD) -- a multi-turn conversation between two agents, in which Teacher poses each support question and delivers correctness feedback, and Solver answers and provides visual grounding explanations (or reflections) for both correct and incorrect answers. This dialogue history is then used as context at the inference phase. Experiments on the EgoCross benchmark demonstrate that our method outperforms both a baseline zero-shot setting and a standard in-context learning approach that passes support set examples directly, achieving 3rd place in the Open-source Track of the 1st Cross-Domain EgoCross Challenge at the CVPR 2026 EgoVis Workshop, for which this paper also serves as a technical report.

Takuya Murakawa, Toru Tamaki

Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya, Japan

VLM Adaptation Video QA Egocentric Video Understanding In-Context Learning

May 27, 2026cs.AI

EgoBench: An Interactive Egocentric Multimodal Benchmark for Tool-Using Agents

As AI agents increasingly operate in open, real-world environments, they require a deep synergy of multimodal perception, tool invocation with multi-hop reasoning, and dynamic interaction with users. However, existing benchmarks fail to jointly evaluate these capabilities due to challenges in designing strictly coupled multi-capability tasks, simulating natural and task-constrained user feedback, and ensuring objective evaluation of dynamic interaction. To bridge this gap, we introduce EgoBench, the first interactive multimodal benchmark for tool-using agents. EgoBench comprises 1,590 egocentric-video-grounded tasks covering five daily scenarios, along with a user-agent-tool interactive environment for evaluation. We implement a three-stage synergistic pipeline through which each task is designed to enforce the joint application of visual perception and tool-augmented multi-hop reasoning. We additionally develop a multi-agent simulated user to evaluate agents' interaction capabilities, which generates high-fidelity, task-aligned responses to agents. Furthermore, we establish a deterministic joint validation framework that guarantees objective assessment through process-based and result-based equivalence. Benchmarking eight video-MLLM agents on EgoBench reveals a severe performance ceiling: the best-performing model achieves only a 34.95% average Joint Success Rate across the three interaction modes. Finally, we conduct a multi-dimensional error analysis to disentangle failure modes, exposing capability bottlenecks for advancing future AI agents.

Yunqi Liu, Tong Niu, Zitong Wang +4

Ant Group

AI Agent Evaluation Egocentric Video Understanding AI Agent Benchmarks Tool-Using Agents Multimodal Tool Use