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Oct 6

SCOUT: Self-Checking and Recovery-Aware Tool-Thought Agents for Ultra-Long Egocentric Video Reasoning

Ultra-long egocentric video understanding requires reasoning over temporally sparse evidence distributed across hours or days, challenging current multimodal models with limited context and the grounding of key video segments. While Chain-of-Tool-Thought (CoTT) agent systems enable iterative retrieval and inspection, they suffer from error propagation due to rigid zoom-in strategies that lack recovery mechanisms. In this work, we address these challenges through SCOUT (Self-Checking Chain-Of-Tool-thought), a recovery-aware agentic framework introducing an adaptive policy that evaluates intermediate tool observations and dynamically trades off exploitation (zoom-in) and exploration (region switching), enabling robust multi-hop reasoning over extremely long horizons. However, training such multi-turn tool-using agents remains challenging, as existing RL methods rely on sparse outcome-level rewards and lack supervision over extended decision trajectories, resulting in suboptimal credit assignment for long-horizon reasoning. To address this, we develop UPS-GRPO, an uncertainty-prioritized policy optimization method that concentrates exploration on high-uncertainty post-tool states while preserving sample efficiency. We further introduce a turn-level advantage decomposition that integrates outcome rewards with tool-grounded temporal alignment rewards for improved credit assignment. Experiments show that SCOUT achieves state-of-the-art results on ultra-long egocentric benchmarks, while remaining competitive on shorter-horizon long-video settings.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 7

EgoSAT: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Egocentric Streaming Interaction Understanding

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/

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 22

EgoEsportsQA: An Egocentric Video Benchmark for Perception and Reasoning in Esports

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.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 19

EgoMemReason: A Memory-Driven Reasoning Benchmark for Long-Horizon Egocentric Video Understanding

Next-generation visual assistants, such as smart glasses, embodied agents, and always-on life-logging systems, must reason over an entire day or more of continuous visual experience. In ultra-long video settings, relevant information is sparsely distributed across hours or days, making memory a fundamental challenge: models must accumulate information over time, recall prior states, track temporal order, and abstract recurring patterns. However, existing week-long video benchmarks are primarily designed for perception and recognition, such as moment localization or global summarization, rather than reasoning that requires integrating evidence across multiple days. To address this gap, we introduce EgoMemReason, a comprehensive benchmark that systematically evaluates week-long egocentric video understanding through memory-driven reasoning. EgoMemReason evaluates three complementary memory types: entity memory, tracking how object states evolve and change across days; event memory, recalling and ordering activities separated by hours or days; and behavior memory, abstracting recurring patterns from sparse, repeated observations over the whole week period. EgoMemReason comprises 500 questions across three memory types and six core challenges, with an average of 5.1 video segments of evidence per question and 25.9 hours of memory backtracking. We evaluate EgoMemReason on 17 methods across MLLMs and agentic frameworks, revealing that even the best model achieves only 39.6% overall accuracy. Further analysis shows that the three memory types fail for distinct reasons and that performance degrades as evidence spans longer temporal horizons, revealing that long-horizon memory remains far from solved. We believe EgoMemReason establishes a strong foundation for evaluating and advancing long-context, memory-aware multimodal systems.

  • 9 authors
·
May 10

EgoReasoner: Learning Egocentric 4D Reasoning via Task-Adaptive Structured Thinking

Egocentric video understanding is inherently complex due to the dynamic 4D nature of the environment, where camera motion and object displacements necessitate a continuous re-evaluation of spatial relations. In this work, we target a suite of under-explored egocentric 4D reasoning tasks, including fixture interaction counting, viewpoint-relative fixture location, object movement itinerary tracking, and stationary object localization, that require fundamentally different cognitive operations: spatial anchoring, temporal tracking, and duration reasoning. We observe that these structural differences make task-agnostic approaches insufficient: generic Chain-of-Thought methods lack task-appropriate reasoning primitives, and uniform reinforcement learning actively destabilizes performance on spatial tasks. To address this, we propose EgoReasoner, a two-stage framework that aligns both the reasoning scaffold and the reward signal to each task's cognitive structure. In the first stage, Task-Adaptive Thinking Templates guide the synthesis of structured CoT traces that teach the model to reason adaptively across task types via supervised fine-tuning. In the second stage, task-aware reward functions verify entity grounding, temporal alignment, and task-adaptive logical consistency, selectively strengthening each reasoning pathway via reinforcement fine-tuning with GRPO. Our 3B-parameter model, trained on only 16K samples, achieves 37.5% average accuracy on the challenging HD-EPIC benchmark, surpassing Qwen2.5-VL-7B (25.7%) by over 10 points.

  • 12 authors
·
Mar 30

Do Egocentric Video-Language Models Capture Both Hand- and Object-Centric Cues?

Hand-object interaction (HOI) recognition requires capturing both hand manipulations and object transformations. However, existing video-language models often fall into shortcuts by relying on spurious correlations among hands, objects, or environmental context, rather than reasoning from the appearance and dynamics of hands and objects themselves. To address this limitation, we propose a new learning paradigm that combines (i) hand-object masked training, which enables robust reasoning from partial hand or object observations, and (ii) an HOI-dynamics-aware decoder that explicitly learns hand- and object-centric embeddings through auxiliary predictions of their locations and semantics, enhancing sensitivity to both cues. To systematically evaluate such cue-specific reasoning, we introduce Cue-Isolated HOI (CI-HOI), a new evaluation that assesses models' ability to predict actions from hand- and object-related cues independently. To enable CI-HOI, we curate the DEHOI testbed, which separates hand- and object-related observations for disentangled HOI evaluation through inpainting. Using DEHOI, we demonstrate both quantitatively and qualitatively that our training strategy exploits hand- and object-centric information more effectively than existing models. Our approach improves over existing models on DEHOI, standard action recognition, object state recognition, and even robot manipulation action recognition, leading to more robust HOI understanding.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 8

Vision-Language Models for Egocentric Video: From Hand-Object Interaction to Embodied AI

Egocentric video captures activities from the wearer's perspective, providing a direct view of human attention, hand--object interaction, and goal-directed behavior. This perspective is increasingly important for wearable intelligence, assistive systems, human--robot interaction, and embodied AI, yet it introduces challenges including ego-motion, occlusion, small active objects, viewpoint-dependent appearance, and long-range temporal dependencies. Vision--language models (VLMs) offer a promising foundation for addressing these challenges by linking visual observations with semantic knowledge and natural-language supervision. This survey presents a critical review of VLMs for egocentric video understanding, tracing the progression from conventional recognition architectures to multimodal foundation models and embodied systems. We organize the literature around tasks, datasets, hand--object interaction understanding, temporal reasoning, frame and clip selection, multimodal representation learning, prompting, semantic alignment, and model adaptation. Particular attention is given to graph-based and object-centric reasoning as mechanisms for modeling relations among hands, objects, actions, and scene context over time. We further examine how first-person perception and multimodal foundation models support wearable assistance, robot skill learning, human-to-robot transfer, and embodied decision making. Across the reviewed literature, a consistent limitation emerges: current models recognize visible objects more reliably than evolving interactions, actions, and user intent, especially over long activities. We therefore identify temporally grounded reasoning, interaction-aware supervision, efficient long-video processing, multimodal fusion, graph-enhanced representations, cross-domain generalization, privacy, and trustworthy evaluation as key priorities for deployable embodied intelligence.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 19

Graph it first! Enabling Reasoning on Long-form Egocentric Videos through Scene Graphs

Existing multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) face significant challenges in processing long video sequences due to strict input token limitations. As a result, current video understanding approaches, especially in egocentric settings characterized by complex dynamics, frequent state changes, and moving cameras, are forced to massively subsample frames. This leads to severe loss of temporal and contextual information, constraining their ability to perform fine-grained video reasoning. In this work, we introduce a framework for egocentric video question answering (VQA) that overcomes these input constraints through Egocentric Scene Graphs (EgoSGs), i.e., temporally grounded, structured representations that capture objects, attributes, spatial relations, and interactions over time. By representing videos as compact, text-based scene graphs, our method preserves the essential visual and temporal information of the original video in a symbolic form that drastically reduces input length while maintaining semantic richness. Crucially, this enables MLLMs to reason efficiently over entire video sequences within their token budget. On HD-EPIC VQA, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming strong video-based baselines on multiple models and suggesting that structured, temporally grounded representations like EgoSGs can bridge long-form egocentric video understanding and the context limitations of today's MLLMs.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 1

Ego2Act: Evaluating Goal-Directed Manipulation in Egocentric Video Generation

Video generation models are increasingly being explored as world simulators for embodied planning and learning. To do so effectively, these models must not only generate visually appealing frames, but also predict how environments dynamically evolve when executing goal-directed actions. While evaluating these capabilities is crucial, existing benchmarks focus mainly on single short actions or step-by-step instructions. This leaves multi-step physical reasoning underexplored, especially in egocentric video generation that requires planning to simulate proper execution to accomplish high-level goals by carrying out multiple real-world manipulations. We introduce Ego2Act, a goal-directed benchmark featuring 2,640 videos from 110 real-world tasks across day-to-day settings, varying object clutter and multi-step complexity. Given an initial scene image and a high-level goal, Ego2Act evaluates whether video generation models can produce realistic egocentric videos of a hand manipulating objects to carry out the task. To support scalable evaluation, we also introduce Ego2ActJudge, a reference-free evaluation pipeline that achieves better task completion and physics plausibility evaluation alignment with human consensus compared to relevant baselines. Our findings reveal that models' generated simulations often skip or partially execute steps, leaving later steps missing dependent states, which leads to unfulfilled goal. Furthermore, models consistently fail at fine-grained physical dynamics, particularly during complex object manipulation and persistent world modeling. We hope Ego2Act provides a rigorous testbed for advancing video models toward physically plausible, goal-directed simulation.

EgoMonth: A Month-Level Egocentric Video Benchmark for Long-Term Spatiotemporal Memory

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have led to substantial progress in video understanding, accompanied by a growing number of long video benchmarks. However, existing benchmarks rely predominantly on web-sourced videos that lack inter-clip spatiotemporal continuity, making it difficult to assess whether models can maintain consistent memory across days or weeks of real-world experience. We introduce EgoMonth, the first month-level egocentric video understanding benchmark. EgoMonth comprises over 300 hours of first-person daily-life recordings from 20 participants spanning 20 to 120 days, paired with 1,443 human-crafted multiple-choice question-answer pairs. We design a cognitively grounded 14-task evaluation framework organized into three hierarchical cognitive levels: Schema Consolidation, Episodic Indexing, and Cascading Reasoning. Evaluation of state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source MLLMs reveals that even the best-performing model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, achieves only 71.8% macro-average accuracy, remaining 22.4 percentage points below the corrected human baseline of 94.2%. Several models perform near or below the 25% chance level on tasks such as Route Reasoning, Cross-view Spatial Reasoning, and Direction Judgement, while even the strongest closed-source model remains substantially below human performance. These results indicate that current MLLMs function as lossy summarizers rather than faithful memorizers, highlighting the need for architectures with genuine long-term spatiotemporal memory.

  • 18 authors
·
Aug 12

EgoSafetyBench: A Diagnostic Egocentric Video Benchmark for Evaluating Embodied VLMs as Runtime Safety Guards

Vision-language models (VLMs) are now proposed as runtime safety guards for embodied agents in homes and factories. A deployable guard must catch genuinely unsafe situations while avoiding unnecessary intervention on routine but superficially alarming activity, a distinction that binary safety benchmarks obscure. We introduce EgoSafetyBench, an egocentric video benchmark of 1,200 robot-view scenarios annotated at half-second granularity, to evaluate VLMs as streaming guards across two tracks. The situational track (800 scenarios) spans four families, from routine and safe-but-suspicious scenes to obvious and contextual hazards. The visual-channel track (400 scenarios) targets in-scene text-a sign, sticker, or label visible in the scene-that can misrepresent the physical situation, pairing each misleading sign with a truthful version to test both whether a guard flags the text as misleading and whether the text corrupts its physical-safety judgment. Both tracks use contrastive ladders: near-identical scenarios differing only in a single visible deciding cue, so a correct call must hinge on that cue rather than the overall scene type. We evaluate ten open- and closed-source VLMs. We find that while guards reliably recognize videos containing hazards, they often miss specific hazardous moments, particularly contextual hazards. Furthermore, misleading in-scene signs degrade all tested guards: vulnerable models miss up to a third of hazards, while robust models over-intervene on safe content. Matched controls reveal that apparent safety robustness often reflects indiscriminate alarming rather than true physical reasoning.

EgoPro-Bench: Benchmarking Personalized Proactive Interaction in Egocentric Video Streams

Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remain primarily reactive, failing to continuously perceive environments or proactively assist users. While emerging benchmarks address proactivity, they are largely confined to alert scenarios, neglect personalized context, and fail to evaluate the precise timing of human-machine interactions (HMI).In this paper, we introduce EgoPro-Bench, a novel benchmark for training and evaluating proactive interaction capabilities based on streaming egocentric videos; it comprises 2,400 videos in the evaluation set and over 12,000 videos in the training set.Unlike previous works, EgoPro-Bench leverages simulated user profiles to generate diverse user intentions and to construct high-fidelity HMI data across 12 distinct domains.Subsequently, we propose a specialized evaluation protocol and metrics, train proactive interaction models designed for efficient reasoning and low-latency interaction on streaming video data, and conduct comprehensive evaluations.Furthermore, we introduce an interaction principle termed "short thinking, better interaction", which allocates a limited token budget prior to intent recognition, thereby enhancing interaction performance.The experiments demonstrate that EgoPro-Bench substantially enhances the intention understanding capabilities of MLLMs and enables accurate identification of appropriate timings for HMI, thereby laying a solid foundation for next-generation user-centric proactive interactive agents.

  • 8 authors
·
May 7

Long Time No See: Benchmarking VLMs for Out-of-Sight Spatiotemporal Reasoning in Egocentric Videos

Real-world AI systems must reason about objects that are no longer visible: an AR assistant guiding a user back to an object used earlier, a household robot retrieving an item someone put away. This requires not just recalling where an object was last seen, but updating its state when it is moved and retaining that update once it leaves view. We refer to this as out-of-sight spatiotemporal reasoning. We introduce Beyond3D, the first VQA benchmark to isolate this ability in dynamic egocentric video: every query targets an object that has been relocated and has since left the field of view. We create our questions from HD-EPIC annotations, building a visibility track for each dynamic object from its 3D position, the camera pose, and the scene geometry to understand at each moment whether it is visible, occluded, or out of view. Beyond3D comprises 9,000 questions in eight types over 135 videos from nine participants, organized as one reasoning chain: visual grounding (is the target observable now), temporal grounding (when it was last visible and last placed), scene localization (which fixture anchors that location), and 3D spatial perception (where it lies relative to the current viewpoint or another object in the scene). We benchmark nine general-purpose and spatially specialized VLMs. The best model reaches 42.2% against 29.7% chance and text-only baselines reaching 31.9%, with the largest failures in recovering when an object was last visible, showing that tracking object movement out of sight remains far from solved for current VLMs.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 27

Symbiotic Attention with Privileged Information for Egocentric Action Recognition

Egocentric video recognition is a natural testbed for diverse interaction reasoning. Due to the large action vocabulary in egocentric video datasets, recent studies usually utilize a two-branch structure for action recognition, ie, one branch for verb classification and the other branch for noun classification. However, correlation studies between the verb and the noun branches have been largely ignored. Besides, the two branches fail to exploit local features due to the absence of a position-aware attention mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel Symbiotic Attention framework leveraging Privileged information (SAP) for egocentric video recognition. Finer position-aware object detection features can facilitate the understanding of actor's interaction with the object. We introduce these features in action recognition and regard them as privileged information. Our framework enables mutual communication among the verb branch, the noun branch, and the privileged information. This communication process not only injects local details into global features but also exploits implicit guidance about the spatio-temporal position of an on-going action. We introduce novel symbiotic attention (SA) to enable effective communication. It first normalizes the detection guided features on one branch to underline the action-relevant information from the other branch. SA adaptively enhances the interactions among the three sources. To further catalyze this communication, spatial relations are uncovered for the selection of most action-relevant information. It identifies the most valuable and discriminative feature for classification. We validate the effectiveness of our SAP quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, it achieves the state-of-the-art on two large-scale egocentric video datasets.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 7, 2020

SPATIOROUTE: Dynamic Prompt Routing for Zero-Shot Spatial Reasoning

Spatial question answering over egocentric video is a challenging task that requires Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to reason about 3D object positions, scene affordances, and directional relationships, particularly in the zero-shot setting where no task-specific fine-tuning is available. We introduce SpatioRoute, a dynamic prompt generation approach that routes each incoming question to a semantically tailored prompt template -- without any additional training, fine-tuning, or 3D sensor input. SpatioRoute operates in two complementary modes: SpatioRoute-R, a rule-based router that deterministically maps question typologies (e.g., What, Is, How, Can, Which) to specialized prompt templates; and SpatioRoute-L, an LLM-driven approach that generates task-specific prompts from the question and situational context alone, with no video input at routing time. We evaluate SpatioRoute on the SQA3D benchmark across VLMs spanning model families. SpatioRoute achieves consistent overall accuracy gains up to 5% over fixed prompt baselines, establishing a new state-of-the-art for zero-shot video-only spatial VQA without requiring 3D point-cloud inputs. As an additional finding, we observe that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, implemented via the Think it Twice architecture, consistently degrades performance in this setting on Qwen series models, confirming that question-aware routing is more effective than uniform reasoning instructions for spatial video understanding.

  • 4 authors
·
May 17

EgoIntent: An Egocentric Step-level Benchmark for Understanding What, Why, and Next

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable video reasoning capabilities across diverse tasks. However, their ability to understand human intent at a fine-grained level in egocentric videos remains largely unexplored. Existing benchmarks focus primarily on episode-level intent reasoning, overlooking the finer granularity of step-level intent understanding. Yet applications such as intelligent assistants, robotic imitation learning, and augmented reality guidance require understanding not only what a person is doing at each step, but also why and what comes next, in order to provide timely and context-aware support. To this end, we introduce EgoIntent, a step-level intent understanding benchmark for egocentric videos. It comprises 3,014 steps spanning 15 diverse indoor and outdoor daily-life scenarios, and evaluates models on three complementary dimensions: local intent (What), global intent (Why), and next-step plan (Next). Crucially, each clip is truncated immediately before the key outcome of the queried step (e.g., contact or grasp) occurs and contains no frames from subsequent steps, preventing future-frame leakage and enabling a clean evaluation of anticipatory step understanding and next-step planning. We evaluate 15 MLLMs, including both state-of-the-art closed-source and open-source models. Even the best-performing model achieves an average score of only 33.31 across the three intent dimensions, underscoring that step-level intent understanding in egocentric videos remains a highly challenging problem that calls for further investigation.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 11

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.

  • 6 authors
·
May 31

EgoTaskQA: Understanding Human Tasks in Egocentric Videos

Understanding human tasks through video observations is an essential capability of intelligent agents. The challenges of such capability lie in the difficulty of generating a detailed understanding of situated actions, their effects on object states (i.e., state changes), and their causal dependencies. These challenges are further aggravated by the natural parallelism from multi-tasking and partial observations in multi-agent collaboration. Most prior works leverage action localization or future prediction as an indirect metric for evaluating such task understanding from videos. To make a direct evaluation, we introduce the EgoTaskQA benchmark that provides a single home for the crucial dimensions of task understanding through question-answering on real-world egocentric videos. We meticulously design questions that target the understanding of (1) action dependencies and effects, (2) intents and goals, and (3) agents' beliefs about others. These questions are divided into four types, including descriptive (what status?), predictive (what will?), explanatory (what caused?), and counterfactual (what if?) to provide diagnostic analyses on spatial, temporal, and causal understandings of goal-oriented tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art video reasoning models on our benchmark and show their significant gaps between humans in understanding complex goal-oriented egocentric videos. We hope this effort will drive the vision community to move onward with goal-oriented video understanding and reasoning.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 7, 2022

Multimodal Spatial Reasoning in the Large Model Era: A Survey and Benchmarks

Humans possess spatial reasoning abilities that enable them to understand spaces through multimodal observations, such as vision and sound. Large multimodal reasoning models extend these abilities by learning to perceive and reason, showing promising performance across diverse spatial tasks. However, systematic reviews and publicly available benchmarks for these models remain limited. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of multimodal spatial reasoning tasks with large models, categorizing recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and introducing open benchmarks for evaluation. We begin by outlining general spatial reasoning, focusing on post-training techniques, explainability, and architecture. Beyond classical 2D tasks, we examine spatial relationship reasoning, scene and layout understanding, as well as visual question answering and grounding in 3D space. We also review advances in embodied AI, including vision-language navigation and action models. Additionally, we consider emerging modalities such as audio and egocentric video, which contribute to novel spatial understanding through new sensors. We believe this survey establishes a solid foundation and offers insights into the growing field of multimodal spatial reasoning. Updated information about this survey, codes and implementation of the open benchmarks can be found at https://github.com/zhengxuJosh/Awesome-Spatial-Reasoning.

EgoCoT-Bench: Benchmarking Grounded and Verifiable Operation-Centric Chain of Thought Reasoning for MLLMs

The rapid development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has led to growing interest in egocentric video understanding, specifically the ability for MLLMs to recognize fine-grained hand-object interactions, track object state changes over time, and reason about manipulative processes in dynamic environments from a first-person perspective. However, existing egocentric video benchmarks suffer from limited grounded rationale evaluation, offering limited support for fine-grained operation-centric reasoning and rarely examining whether model rationales are grounded in explicit spatio-temporal evidence. To address this gap, we introduce EgoCoT-Bench, a fine-grained egocentric benchmark for grounded and verifiable operation-centric reasoning with explicit step-by-step rationale annotations. Overall, EgoCoT-Bench comprises 3,172 verifiable QA pairs over 351 egocentric videos separated into four task groups for a total of 12 sub-task groups, encompassing perception and retrospection, anticipation, and high-level reasoning. The benchmark is constructed through a spatio-temporal scene graphs (STSG) guided generation framework and is further refined by human annotators to ensure correctness, egocentric relevance and fine-grained quality. Experimental results show continuing difficulties with egocentric fine-grained reasoning and further reveal that many multimodal models produce explanations that are answer-correct, but have evidence that is inconsistent with the answer. We hope EgoCoT-Bench can serve as a useful testbed for grounded and verifiable reasoning in egocentric video understanding. Project page and supplementary materials are available at: https://dstardust.github.io/EgoCoT/.

  • 4 authors
·
May 18

X-Ego: Acquiring Team-Level Tactical Situational Awareness via Cross-Egocentric Contrastive Video Representation Learning

Human team tactics emerge from each player's individual perspective and their ability to anticipate, interpret, and adapt to teammates' intentions. While advances in video understanding have improved the modeling of team interactions in sports, most existing work relies on third-person broadcast views and overlooks the synchronous, egocentric nature of multi-agent learning. We introduce X-Ego-CS, a benchmark dataset consisting of 124 hours of gameplay footage from 45 professional-level matches of the popular e-sports game Counter-Strike 2, designed to facilitate research on multi-agent decision-making in complex 3D environments. X-Ego-CS provides cross-egocentric video streams that synchronously capture all players' first-person perspectives along with state-action trajectories. Building on this resource, we propose Cross-Ego Contrastive Learning (CECL), which aligns teammates' egocentric visual streams to foster team-level tactical situational awareness from an individual's perspective. We evaluate CECL on a teammate-opponent location prediction task, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing an agent's ability to infer both teammate and opponent positions from a single first-person view using state-of-the-art video encoders. Together, X-Ego-CS and CECL establish a foundation for cross-egocentric multi-agent benchmarking in esports. More broadly, our work positions gameplay understanding as a testbed for multi-agent modeling and tactical learning, with implications for spatiotemporal reasoning and human-AI teaming in both virtual and real-world domains. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/HATS-ICT/x-ego.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 21, 2025

MARS: Technical Report for the CASTLE Challenge at EgoVis 2026

This report presents MARS, short for Multimodal Agentic Reasoning with Source selection, our system for the CASTLE Challenge at EgoVis 2026. Participants must answer 185 closed-form questions over the CASTLE 2024 dataset. In contrast to prior single-video egocentric benchmarks, CASTLE requires reasoning over four days of activity, 15 synchronized perspectives, official transcripts, and multiple auxiliary modalities, including personal photos, auxiliary videos, gaze, thermal imagery, and heartrate measurements. MARS therefore treats the task as an agentic evidence-selection problem over multimodal sources rather than a purely text-only pipeline. MARS first follows the official CASTLE directory organization to build evidence memories from two primary sources, videos and transcripts, and four auxiliary sources, gaze, heartrate, photos, and thermal imagery. Long videos are converted into captions and DeepSeek-based summaries only because CASTLE videos are too long to fit directly into the model context for every question; this step compresses temporal evidence while keeping photos and other auxiliary media available as source-specific evidence. At inference time, a GPT-5.4 decision agent repeatedly chooses whether to continue reasoning, request a specific missing modality, produce an answer, or fall back to a random option when the evidence remains insufficient. The resulting system achieved second place on the final CASTLE Challenge leaderboard. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Hyu-Zhang/MARS.

  • 7 authors
·
May 17

Physion-Eval: Evaluating Physical Realism in Generated Video via Human Reasoning

Video generation models are increasingly used as world simulators for storytelling, simulation, and embodied AI. As these models advance, a key question arises: do generated videos obey the physical laws of the real world? Existing evaluations largely rely on automated metrics or coarse human judgments such as preferences or rubric-based checks. While useful for assessing perceptual quality, these methods provide limited insight into when and why generated dynamics violate real-world physical constraints. We introduce Physion-Eval, a large-scale benchmark of expert human reasoning for diagnosing physical realism failures in videos generated by five state-of-the-art models across egocentric and exocentric views, containing 10,990 expert reasoning traces spanning 22 fine-grained physical categories. Each generated video is derived from a corresponding real-world reference video depicting a clear physical process, and annotated with temporally localized glitches, structured failure categories, and natural-language explanations of the violated physical behavior. Using this dataset, we reveal a striking limitation of current video generation models: in physics-critical scenarios, 83.3% of exocentric and 93.5% of egocentric generated videos exhibit at least one human-identifiable physical glitch. We hope Physion-Eval will set a new standard for physical realism evaluation and guide the development of physics-grounded video generation. The benchmark is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/PhysionLabs/Physion-Eval.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 19

EgoTools: Towards Tool-Centric Reasoning in Real-World Egocentric Videos

Real-world embodied tasks, from everyday activities to professional procedures, require agents to act under physical constraints while tracking evolving object and task states. Tool use sits at the heart of such tasks, as many everyday and professional activities are tool-mediated. Understanding them requires reasoning about affordances, hand-tool-object geometry, procedural progress, and causal effects on target objects. Yet despite strong performance on perception-oriented video tasks such as captioning and general video QA, current multimodal video models remain limited in this form of tool-centric embodied reasoning. Progress in this direction has been limited by the lack of real-world egocentric data and diagnostic benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce EgoTools, the first comprehensive suite for egocentric tool-use understanding. It consists of two complementary components: EgoTools-Data, a large-scale corpus of 100 hours of tool-centric egocentric recordings with synchronized audio, dense captions, reasoning-heavy narrations, and supplementary 3D information; and EgoTools-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark of 1,000 QA pairs across four tracks that cover tool-use understanding from perception and geometry to procedure and causal reasoning. Experimental results show that current models still struggle to ground tool use in visual evidence: Gemini-3.1-Pro achieves 66.9% overall accuracy but only 51.7% on Perception & Grounding. Beyond evaluation, we validate EgoTools-Data as a training resource. On the full 1,000-question benchmark, full supervised fine-tuning improves Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct from 50.0% to 60.9%, under strict source-video separation. Together, these results establish EgoTools as a unified resource for both training and diagnostic evaluation of real-world egocentric tool-use understanding.

ropedia-ai Ropedia
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Sep 29 2

MEMORA: Embodied Action Memory from Egocentric Videos for Reasoning and Planning

Long-horizon robot planning requires more than predicting what actions will do next; it also requires memory of the embodied experience that makes future goals interpretable. People do not plan from the present scene alone: they draw on remembered places, object-state changes, prior procedures, and regularities revealed through repeated action. We formulate Embodied Action Memory (EAM) as the capability to form, maintain, and use such experience as a persistent memory state for later decisions. MEMORA realizes EAM with a formation-consolidation-retrieval lifecycle and four typed stores: Environment Memory, Entity Memory, Activity Memory, and Inferred Knowledge. Online editing maintains object identities and state histories as new observations arrive; offline consolidation abstracts repeated experience into reusable procedures and participant-specific regularities. MEMORA-Bench evaluates this lifecycle on 45 hours of EPIC-KITCHENS-100 extension video across 18 participants through memory-grounded planning, including previously unseen goals, and a complementary memory-assessment task. Across four open-weight language models, full MEMORA--combining editing, typed stores, and consolidation--achieves the strongest aggregate results among the evaluated memory conditions. It improves memory-assessment accuracy by up to 20.5 points over the strongest controlled baseline and improves out-of-distribution Robot-Grounded Plan score by up to 16.6% relative. A qualitative two-task robot deployment study further illustrates how memory-grounded language plans can interface with downstream control, while the overall results show that editable, consolidated memory can supply remembered context for robot planning. Project page: https://yuzihaowashu.github.io/MEMORA/

  • 3 authors
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Jul 14

From My View to Yours: Learning Egocentric Cues from Exocentric Video using Privileged Egocentric Supervision

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance across a wide range of video understanding tasks. However, their viewpoint-invariant training limits their ability to infer egocentric properties, such as human-object interactions, from exocentric video observations. This limitation is particularly critical for applications such as Activities of Daily Living (ADL) monitoring, where understanding egocentric properties is essential but deploying wearable egocentric cameras is often impractical. We propose Ego2ExoVLM, a framework that enables VLMs to infer egocentric properties directly from exocentric videos by leveraging time-synchronized ego-exo video pairs during training. Our key insight is to treat the egocentric viewpoint as privileged supervision, providing rich interaction signals that are available only during training. Ego2ExoVLM consists of two complementary components: Ego2Exo Sequence Distillation, which transfers egocentric reasoning through a language-level sequence distillation objective, and Ego Adaptive Visual Tokens, which encourage the model to surface interaction-relevant cues within exocentric visual representations. To evaluate this capability, we introduce Ego-in-Exo Perception, a benchmark for assessing the understanding of egocentric properties from exocentric videos. We evaluate Ego2ExoVLM on 10 tasks spanning Ego-in-Exo Perception and existing ADL benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the ADL-X benchmark suite and consistently outperforming strong baselines on our proposed benchmark. All code, models, and data will be released at https://github.com/dominickrei/EgoExo4ADL.

  • 4 authors
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Jul 6

Egocentric Co-Pilot: Web-Native Smart-Glasses Agents for Assistive Egocentric AI

What if accessing the web did not require a screen, a stable desk, or even free hands? For people navigating crowded cities, living with low vision, or experiencing cognitive overload, smart glasses coupled with AI agents could turn the web into an always-on assistive layer over daily life. We present Egocentric Co-Pilot, a web-native neuro-symbolic framework that runs on smart glasses and uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to orchestrate a toolbox of perception, reasoning, and web tools. An egocentric reasoning core combines Temporal Chain-of-Thought with Hierarchical Context Compression to support long-horizon question answering and decision support over continuous first-person video, far beyond a single model's context window. Additionally, a lightweight multimodal intent layer maps noisy speech and gaze into structured commands. We further implement and evaluate a cloud-native WebRTC pipeline integrating streaming speech, video, and control messages into a unified channel for smart glasses and browsers. In parallel, we deploy an on-premise WebSocket baseline, exposing concrete trade-offs between local inference and cloud offloading in terms of latency, mobility, and resource use. Experiments on Egolife and HD-EPIC demonstrate competitive or state-of-the-art egocentric QA performance, and a human-in-the-loop study on smart glasses shows higher task completion and user satisfaction than leading commercial baselines. Taken together, these results indicate that web-connected egocentric co-pilots can be a practical path toward more accessible, context-aware assistance in everyday life. By grounding operation in web-native communication primitives and modular, auditable tool use, Egocentric Co-Pilot offers a concrete blueprint for assistive, always-on web agents that support education, accessibility, and social inclusion for people who may benefit most from contextual, egocentric AI.

  • 11 authors
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Mar 1

StreamGaze: Gaze-Guided Temporal Reasoning and Proactive Understanding in Streaming Videos

Streaming video understanding requires models not only to process temporally incoming frames, but also to anticipate user intention for realistic applications like AR glasses. While prior streaming benchmarks evaluate temporal reasoning, none measure whether MLLMs can interpret or leverage human gaze signals within a streaming setting. To fill this gap, we introduce StreamGaze, the first benchmark designed to evaluate how effectively MLLMs use gaze for temporal and proactive reasoning in streaming videos. StreamGaze introduces gaze-guided past, present, and proactive tasks that comprehensively evaluate streaming video understanding. These tasks assess whether models can use real-time gaze to follow shifting attention and infer user intentions from only past and currently observed frames. To build StreamGaze, we develop a gaze-video QA generation pipeline that aligns egocentric videos with raw gaze trajectories via fixation extraction, region-specific visual prompting, and scanpath construction. This pipeline produces spatio-temporally grounded QA pairs that closely reflect human perceptual dynamics. Across all StreamGaze tasks, we observe substantial performance gaps between state-of-the-art MLLMs and human performance, revealing fundamental limitations in gaze-based temporal reasoning, intention modeling, and proactive prediction. We further provide detailed analyses of gaze-prompting strategies, reasoning behaviors, and task-specific failure modes, offering deeper insight into why current MLLMs struggle and what capabilities future models must develop. All data and code will be publicly released to support continued research in gaze-guided streaming video understanding.

adobe-research Adobe Research
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Dec 1, 2025 2

VL-MemKnG: Hybrid Memory with a Spatio-Temporal Knowledge Graph for Question Answering over Long Egocentric Navigation Trajectories

Answering navigation-relevant questions over long egocentric videos requires retrieving and organizing evidence distributed across distant temporal moments while maintaining spatial and contextual consistency. Although long-context vision--language models can achieve strong answer quality, they are computationally expensive for long trajectories and inefficient for repeated querying. Recent graph-based approaches such as VL-KnG address this challenge through persistent spatio-temporal knowledge graphs, but graph-centric retrieval alone may underrepresent broader temporal continuity and contextual cues. We present VL-MemKnG, a hybrid memory framework that extends VL-KnG by combining a spatio-temporal knowledge graph with persistent segment-level contextual memory. The knowledge graph captures structured relational information and long-range object associations, while segment-level memory preserves broader temporal context for long-horizon evidence retrieval. A hybrid retrieval-and-reasoning module jointly operates over both memory representations to produce evidence-grounded answers and temporally organized supporting evidence. We also introduce WalkieKnowledgeT+, an extension of WalkieKnowledge for long-horizon navigation-oriented video question answering. The benchmark includes temporally distributed reasoning tasks requiring evidence aggregation across multiple non-cooccurring moments. On WalkieKnowledgeT+, VL-MemKnG improves Top-1 retrieval accuracy from 58% to 67% and Recall@1 from 34.50% to 40.55%, outperforming all compared methods, including Gemini 2.5 Pro and Qwen 3.5+. The gains are particularly pronounced on temporal-global and temporally scattered aggregation questions, demonstrating the benefits of combining structured relational memory with segment-level contextual memory while maintaining efficient query-time inference.

  • 5 authors
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Jun 14

Learning Situated Awareness in the Real World

A core aspect of human perception is situated awareness, the ability to relate ourselves to the surrounding physical environment and reason over possible actions in context. However, most existing benchmarks for multimodal foundation models (MFMs) emphasize environment-centric spatial relations (relations among objects in a scene), while largely overlooking observer-centric relationships that require reasoning relative to agent's viewpoint, pose, and motion. To bridge this gap, we introduce SAW-Bench (Situated Awareness in the Real World), a novel benchmark for evaluating egocentric situated awareness using real-world videos. SAW-Bench comprises 786 self-recorded videos captured with Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) smart glasses spanning diverse indoor and outdoor environments, and over 2,071 human-annotated question-answer pairs. It probes a model's observer-centric understanding with six different awareness tasks. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals a human-model performance gap of 37.66%, even with the best-performing MFM, Gemini 3 Flash. Beyond this gap, our in-depth analysis uncovers several notable findings; for example, while models can exploit partial geometric cues in egocentric videos, they often fail to infer a coherent camera geometry, leading to systematic spatial reasoning errors. We position SAW-Bench as a benchmark for situated spatial intelligence, moving beyond passive observation to understanding physically grounded, observer-centric dynamics.

Being-H0.7: A Latent World-Action Model from Egocentric Videos

Visual-Language-Action models (VLAs) have advanced generalist robot control by mapping multimodal observations and language instructions directly to actions, but sparse action supervision often encourages shortcut mappings rather than representations of dynamics, contact, and task progress. Recent world-action models introduce future prediction through video rollouts, yet pixel-space prediction is a costly and indirect substrate for control, as it may model visual details irrelevant to action generation and introduces substantial training or inference overhead. We present Being-H0.7, a latent world-action model that brings future-aware reasoning into VLA-style policies without generating future frames. Being-H0.7 inserts learnable latent queries between perception and action as a compact reasoning interface, and trains them with a future-informed dual-branch design: a deployable prior branch infers latent states from the current context, while a training-only posterior branch replaces the queries with embeddings from future observations. Jointly aligning the two branches at the latent reasoning space leads the prior branch to reason future-aware, action-useful structure from current observations alone. At inference, Being-H0.7 discards the posterior branch and performs no visual rollout. Experiments across six simulation benchmarks and diverse real-world tasks show that Being-H0.7 achieves state-of-the-art or comparable performance, combining the predictive benefits of world models with the efficiency and deployability of direct VLA policies.

  • 9 authors
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Apr 29

Vinci2: Providing Proactive Assistance in Continuous Egocentric Videos

When should an intelligent assistant speak up without being asked? Continuous egocentric video offers rich, evolving context that enables a new form of assistance: one that is proactive rather than merely reactive. Yet existing approaches either wait passively for user queries or treat every detected event as requiring a response, without considering the user's history, current activity, or whether assistance would actually be welcome. We reframe proactive assistance as a context-dependent decision problem: the agent must not only perceive what is happening, but reason over accumulated temporal context to determine when and whether to intervene. To this end, we present Vinci2, a proactive egocentric assistance system that advances the on-device assistant Vinci from reactive response toward proactivity. On the evaluation side, we present EgoServe, the first large-scale benchmark for proactive assistance in continuous egocentric video. EgoServe comprises over 3,000 service instances organized along 4 temporal memory horizons, ranging from immediate safety alerts to long-term habit coaching, across 10 service categories. On the modeling side, we propose EgoMemo, a training-free, memory-augmented agent that maintains three complementary memory representations: multi-scale temporal summaries, a semantic knowledge graph, and visual embedding archives. At each timestep, EgoMemo performs retrieval-augmented reasoning to determine whether assistance is warranted and, if so, produces contextually grounded responses. Experiments demonstrate that EgoMemo establishes strong baselines on EgoServe while remaining competitive on existing egocentric benchmarks. Our benchmark and code are publicly available at https://sitonggong.github.io/EgoServe-page/{Vinci2}.

RoboReact: Agentic Skill Distillation from Generated Egocentric Videos for Generalizable Whole-Body Manipulation

Humanoid robots have the potential to perform dexterous manipulation in human environments, yet acquiring diverse and generalizable skills remains costly due to expensive hardware data collection and labor-intensive annotation. Recent advances in video generative models provide a promising opportunity to synthesize rich manipulation experiences from visual observations, but transferring such imagined behaviors into executable whole-body humanoid skills remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present RoboReact, a framework that automatically synthesizes whole-body humanoid manipulation skills from a single egocentric RGB-D observation. RoboReact generates human manipulation videos, extracts geometry-preserving interaction keyframes through depth-aware 3D reconstruction, and retargets them to high-DoF humanoid platforms while preserving hand-object interaction geometry. To bridge the gap between imagined plans and physical execution, RoboReact performs online object-centric re-grounding and leverages a vision-language model-guided refinement loop to adapt skills under geometric mismatch and execution deviations. The refined skills are executed through a whole-body controller, enabling coordinated whole-body manipulation and dexterous interaction. Experiments on real humanoid robots demonstrate that RoboReact generalizes across diverse object configurations and robustly recovers from execution disturbances without requiring teleoperation or human demonstrations. These results highlight the potential of combining generative models, vision-language reasoning, and closed-loop control for scalable humanoid skill acquisition.

  • 6 authors
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Aug 4

MA-EgoQA: Question Answering over Egocentric Videos from Multiple Embodied Agents

As embodied models become powerful, humans will collaborate with multiple embodied AI agents at their workplace or home in the future. To ensure better communication between human users and the multi-agent system, it is crucial to interpret incoming information from agents in parallel and refer to the appropriate context for each query. Existing challenges include effectively compressing and communicating high volumes of individual sensory inputs in the form of video and correctly aggregating multiple egocentric videos to construct system-level memory. In this work, we first formally define a novel problem of understanding multiple long-horizon egocentric videos simultaneously collected from embodied agents. To facilitate research in this direction, we introduce MultiAgent-EgoQA (MA-EgoQA), a benchmark designed to systemically evaluate existing models in our scenario. MA-EgoQA provides 1.7k questions unique to multiple egocentric streams, spanning five categories: social interaction, task coordination, theory-of-mind, temporal reasoning, and environmental interaction. We further propose a simple baseline model for MA-EgoQA named EgoMAS, which leverages shared memory across embodied agents and agent-wise dynamic retrieval. Through comprehensive evaluation across diverse baselines and EgoMAS on MA-EgoQA, we find that current approaches are unable to effectively handle multiple egocentric streams, highlighting the need for future advances in system-level understanding across the agents. The code and benchmark are available at https://ma-egoqa.github.io.

kaist-ai KAIST AI
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Mar 10 2

World-Language-Action Model for Unified World Modeling, Language Reasoning, and Action Synthesis

We propose world-language-action (WLA) models as a new class of embodied foundation models. WLA takes textual instructions, images, and robot states as inputs to jointly predict textual subtasks, subgoal images, and robot actions, conjoining the world modeling interface to learn from extensive egocentric videos as in the world-action model (WAM) and the language reasoning capacities to solve complex long-horizon tasks as in vision-language-action (VLA) models. At the core of WLA lies an autoregressive (AR) Transformer backbone, instead of a bidirectional diffusion Transformer as in WAMs, to predict the next state, comprising the semantic-level textual intention and complementary fine-grained physical dynamics. The physical dynamics are supervised by the world modeling objective based on a dedicated World Expert, and are leveraged to ease the characterization of the state-action correlation for the Action Expert. WLA leverages meta-queries to make the world prediction implicitly impact the action generation so that the former can be disabled during inference. The world prediction can also be activated to enable test-time scaling for improved robot control. Our WLA-0 prototype, with 2B active parameters, achieves 40 ms per inference on an NVIDIA RTX 5090. Evaluations across simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that WLA-0 achieves state-of-the-art multi-task and long-horizon learning abilities, e.g., 92.94\% success rate on RoboTwin2.0 Clean and 56.5\% success rate on RMBench. WLA-0 also holds the promise to learn novel tasks directly from cross-embodiment robot videos without action annotations.

  • 12 authors
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Jun 3 1

Towards Safer and Understandable Driver Intention Prediction

Autonomous driving (AD) systems are becoming increasingly capable of handling complex tasks, mainly due to recent advances in deep learning and AI. As interactions between autonomous systems and humans increase, the interpretability of decision-making processes in driving systems becomes increasingly crucial for ensuring safe driving operations. Successful human-machine interaction requires understanding the underlying representations of the environment and the driving task, which remains a significant challenge in deep learning-based systems. To address this, we introduce the task of interpretability in maneuver prediction before they occur for driver safety, i.e., driver intent prediction (DIP), which plays a critical role in AD systems. To foster research in interpretable DIP, we curate the eXplainable Driving Action Anticipation Dataset (DAAD-X), a new multimodal, ego-centric video dataset to provide hierarchical, high-level textual explanations as causal reasoning for the driver's decisions. These explanations are derived from both the driver's eye-gaze and the ego-vehicle's perspective. Next, we propose Video Concept Bottleneck Model (VCBM), a framework that generates spatio-temporally coherent explanations inherently, without relying on post-hoc techniques. Finally, through extensive evaluations of the proposed VCBM on the DAAD-X dataset, we demonstrate that transformer-based models exhibit greater interpretability than conventional CNN-based models. Additionally, we introduce a multilabel t-SNE visualization technique to illustrate the disentanglement and causal correlation among multiple explanations. Our data, code and models are available at: https://mukil07.github.io/VCBM.github.io/

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 10, 2025

DMC^3: Dual-Modal Counterfactual Contrastive Construction for Egocentric Video Question Answering

Egocentric Video Question Answering (Egocentric VideoQA) plays an important role in egocentric video understanding, which refers to answering questions based on first-person videos. Although existing methods have made progress through the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning, they ignore the unique challenges posed by the first-person perspective, such as understanding multiple events and recognizing hand-object interactions. To deal with these challenges, we propose a Dual-Modal Counterfactual Contrastive Construction (DMC^3) framework, which contains an egocentric videoqa baseline, a counterfactual sample construction module and a counterfactual sample-involved contrastive optimization. Specifically, We first develop a counterfactual sample construction module to generate positive and negative samples for textual and visual modalities through event description paraphrasing and core interaction mining, respectively. Then, We feed these samples together with the original samples into the baseline. Finally, in the counterfactual sample-involved contrastive optimization module, we apply contrastive loss to minimize the distance between the original sample features and the positive sample features, while maximizing the distance from the negative samples. Experiments show that our method achieve 52.51\% and 46.04\% on the normal and indirect splits of EgoTaskQA, and 13.2\% on QAEGO4D, both reaching the state-of-the-art performance.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 30, 2025

When Thinking Drifts: Evidential Grounding for Robust Video Reasoning

Video reasoning, the task of enabling machines to infer from dynamic visual content through multi-step logic, is crucial for advanced AI. While the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) mechanism has enhanced reasoning in text-based tasks, its application to video understanding remains underexplored. This paper presents a systematic analysis revealing that CoT often degrades performance in video reasoning, generating verbose but misleading internal monologues, and leading to hallucinated visual details and overridden correct intuitions - a phenomenon we term "visual thinking drift". We explain this drift through a Bayesian lens, positing that CoT traces often diverge from actual visual evidence, instead amplifying internal biases or language priors, causing models to storytell rather than engage in grounded reasoning. To counteract this, we introduce Visual Evidence Reward (VER), a novel reinforcement learning framework that explicitly rewards the generation of reasoning traces that are verifiably grounded in visual evidence. Comprehensive evaluation across 10 diverse video understanding benchmarks demonstrates that our Video-VER consistently achieves top performance. Our work sheds light on the distinct challenges of video-centric reasoning and encourages the development of AI that robustly grounds its inferences in visual evidence - for large multimodal models that not only "think before answering", but also "see while thinking".

  • 4 authors
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Oct 7, 2025

Are Video Models Ready as Zero-Shot Reasoners? An Empirical Study with the MME-CoF Benchmark

Recent video generation models can produce high-fidelity, temporally coherent videos, indicating that they may encode substantial world knowledge. Beyond realistic synthesis, they also exhibit emerging behaviors indicative of visual perception, modeling, and manipulation. Yet, an important question still remains: Are video models ready to serve as zero-shot reasoners in challenging visual reasoning scenarios? In this work, we conduct an empirical study to comprehensively investigate this question, focusing on the leading and popular Veo-3. We evaluate its reasoning behavior across 12 dimensions, including spatial, geometric, physical, temporal, and embodied logic, systematically characterizing both its strengths and failure modes. To standardize this study, we curate the evaluation data into MME-CoF, a compact benchmark that enables in-depth and thorough assessment of Chain-of-Frame (CoF) reasoning. Our findings reveal that while current video models demonstrate promising reasoning patterns on short-horizon spatial coherence, fine-grained grounding, and locally consistent dynamics, they remain limited in long-horizon causal reasoning, strict geometric constraints, and abstract logic. Overall, they are not yet reliable as standalone zero-shot reasoners, but exhibit encouraging signs as complementary visual engines alongside dedicated reasoning models. Project page: https://video-cof.github.io

Video-CoM: Interactive Video Reasoning via Chain of Manipulations

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced video understanding, yet most still "think about videos" ie once a video is encoded, reasoning unfolds entirely in text, treating visual input as a static context. This passive paradigm creates a semantic bottleneck: models cannot rewatch, refocus, or verify evidence, leading to shallow visual reasoning on tasks requiring fine grained spatio temporal understanding. In this work, we introduce Interactive Video Reasoning, a new paradigm that transforms video into an active cognitive workspace, enabling models to "think with videos". Our model, Video CoM, reasons through a Chain of Manipulations (CoM), performing iterative visual actions to gather and refine evidence. To support this behavior, we construct Video CoM Instruct, an 18K instruction tuning dataset curated for multi step manipulation reasoning. Beyond supervised learning, we further optimize the manipulation policy via reinforcement learning with reasoning aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Unlike prior work that relies solely on sparse answer rewards, our method introduces step level reasoning rewards, guiding the model toward grounded and consistent reasoning. Video CoM achieves strong results across nine video reasoning benchmarks, improving average performance by 3.6 percent over recent state of the art models, while training on only 25K SFT and 3K GRPO video samples, significantly fewer than comparable large scale models. Ablation studies demonstrate that reasoning aware rewards improve both accuracy and interpretability. Code: https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/Video-CoM

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 28, 2025

UNIEGO: Proxies as Mediators for Unified Egocentric Video Representation Learning

Egocentric video understanding is inherently limited by the narrow perspective of wearable cameras: a single viewpoint, a single modality, a single model cannot capture the full richness of human action. We argue that a truly expressive egocentric representation must subsume complementary knowledge across viewpoints, modalities, and foundation model representations, yet remain deployable from egocentric video alone. To this end, we introduce a hierarchical multi-teacher distillation framework that produces UNIEGO, a unified egocentric encoder trained with nine teachers spanning ego-exo viewpoints, RGB, depth, and skeleton modalities, and four foundation models. Rather than distilling directly from heterogeneous teachers whose incompatible architectures and feature geometries induce conflicting gradients, our framework interposes a layer of representation-specific Proxy models that translate diverse teacher knowledge into a homogeneous egocentric space. A second distillation stage, Selective Proxy Distillation (SPD), then adaptively selects, for each training sample, the subset of proxies that are both correct and confident, distilling exclusively from reliable supervision and suppressing erroneous signals. SPD is further stabilized by initializing UNIEGO as a learned convex combination of proxy parameters, placing the unified model in a well-conditioned region of the loss landscape before distillation begins. UNIEGO achieves state-of-the-art performance across three egocentric video understanding tasks - action recognition, video retrieval, and action segmentation on three challenging ego-exo benchmarks, outperforming naive multi-teacher distillation baselines and demonstrating that structured, proxy-mediated knowledge transfer yields richer and more discriminative egocentric representations.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 17

EgoSafe: A First-Person Mobile-Captured Benchmark for Visual Safety Understanding

Reliable visual safety understanding in real-world scenarios demands more than just object recognition; it requires causal reasoning under epistemic uncertainty. While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate impressive semantic alignment on standard benchmarks, they often struggle to distinguish between superficial correlation and genuine forensic logic when grounded in the dynamic, partially observable nature of first-person experiences. Existing evaluations, dominated by third-person surveillance footage and binary classification metrics, fail to expose this cognitive gap. To address this, we introduce EgoSafe-Bench, a benchmark specifically designed to probe forensic reasoning in egocentric safety scenarios. It comprises 12,000 unique evaluation samples, generated by pairing each of the 3,000 video clips with a QA chain governed by our proposed Hierarchical Reasoning Evaluation (HRE) protocol. Unlike standard benchmarks, HRE mandates a rigorous reasoning trajectory from initial feature anchoring to blind-spot deduction and intent inference, thereby enforcing logical consistency and penalizing shortcut-based predictions.Extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art LVLMs (e.g., Qwen3-VL, Gemini, VideoLLaMA 3) reveal a significant perception-reasoning decoupling: models often achieve high descriptive scores but exhibit notable fragility in causal reasoning and logical closure. Our work provides both a challenging dataset and a systematic evaluation framework to foster the development of logically robust video understanding systems.

  • 7 authors
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Jul 28

VLX-VR: An Agentic-Aware Video Reasoning Model

Real-world video understanding requires integrating visual, audio, textual, and temporal evidence distributed across a video. Yet many pipelines use a fixed video context and single-pass inference, limiting adaptive evidence acquisition when observations are incomplete, ambiguous, or conflicting. We present VLX-VR, an agentic-aware video reasoning model trained within a video reasoning framework defined by a Think--Memory--Observation loop. At each step, VLX-VR determines the needed evidence, invokes read_memory or write_memory, incorporates the returned Observation, and decides whether to continue or produce the task output. We train VLX-VR with multimodal data, including videos and agent trajectories, using reinforcement learning to learn evidence acquisition, memory use, and termination. On MINERVA, VLX-VR achieves state-of-the-art performance among the models included in our comparison, with 78.79% accuracy. Under the original three duration groups, its accuracies are 76.70%, 78.73%, and 80.92%, with a cross-duration accuracy variance of 2.97~pp^2. On correctly answered samples, 96.20% of VLX-VR's reasoning traces are consistent with the MINERVA reference reasoning traces and the evidence described by them, while approximately 75.80% of all evaluated samples satisfy both answer correctness and this evidence-grounded trace criterion. These results show strong performance and broadly stable behavior across durations, while counting, state changes, causal reasoning, and spatial perception remain challenging.

  • 4 authors
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Sep 8

STORM: Internalized Modeling for Spatial-Temporal Reasoning in Video-Language Models

Many video reasoning tasks require tracking motion, temporal order, and evolving visual states across frames. Existing methods built on large vision-language models (LVLMs) often address this challenge by externalizing reasoning through textual chain-of-thought (CoT), keyframe selection, repeated frame reinsertion, or external tool use. While effective, such pipelines increase inference-time latency and engineering complexity, and they force temporal-visual evidence to be serialized into text or repeatedly re-encoded from frames. Inspired by the intuition that visual reasoning can occur implicitly before verbalization, we propose STORMS (Spatial-Temporal reasOning via inteRnalized Modeling), a two-stage framework that teaches LVLMs to reason through bounded continuous latent trajectories instead of explicit textual CoT. In Stage I, STORMS aligns latent tokens with thought-video representations derived from generated videos, grounding the latent states in dynamic visual evidence. In Stage II, the model is further trained with answer-only supervision, encouraging the reasoning process to be internalized without step-by-step annotations. Generated thought videos are used only during training; at inference, STORMS performs a bounded latent rollout without regenerating videos, reinserting frames, or invoking external visual tools. Experiments on VideoMME, MVBench, TempCompass, and MMVU show that STORMS improves video reasoning accuracy while substantially reducing inference overhead compared with tool or video-generation-based reasoning pipelines.

  • 11 authors
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May 24

X-LeBench: A Benchmark for Extremely Long Egocentric Video Understanding

Long-form egocentric video understanding provides rich contextual information and unique insights into long-term human behaviors, holding significant potential for applications in embodied intelligence, long-term activity analysis, and personalized assistive technologies. However, existing benchmark datasets primarily focus on single, short-duration videos or moderately long videos up to dozens of minutes, leaving a substantial gap in evaluating extensive, ultra-long egocentric video recordings. To address this, we introduce X-LeBench, a novel benchmark dataset specifically crafted for evaluating tasks on extremely long egocentric video recordings. Leveraging the advanced text processing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), X-LeBench develops a life-logging simulation pipeline that produces realistic, coherent daily plans aligned with real-world video data. This approach enables the flexible integration of synthetic daily plans with real-world footage from Ego4D-a massive-scale egocentric video dataset covers a wide range of daily life scenarios-resulting in 432 simulated video life logs that mirror realistic daily activities in contextually rich scenarios. The video life-log durations span from 23 minutes to 16.4 hours. The evaluation of several baseline systems and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) reveals their poor performance across the board, highlighting the inherent challenges of long-form egocentric video understanding and underscoring the need for more advanced models.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 12, 2025

V-STaR: Benchmarking Video-LLMs on Video Spatio-Temporal Reasoning

Human processes video reasoning in a sequential spatio-temporal reasoning logic, we first identify the relevant frames ("when") and then analyse the spatial relationships ("where") between key objects, and finally leverage these relationships to draw inferences ("what"). However, can Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) also "reason through a sequential spatio-temporal logic" in videos? Existing Video-LLM benchmarks primarily focus on assessing object presence, neglecting relational reasoning. Consequently, it is difficult to measure whether a model truly comprehends object interactions (actions/events) in videos or merely relies on pre-trained "memory" of co-occurrences as biases in generating answers. In this work, we introduce a Video Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (V-STaR) benchmark to address these shortcomings. The key idea is to decompose video understanding into a Reverse Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (RSTR) task that simultaneously evaluates what objects are present, when events occur, and where they are located while capturing the underlying Chain-of-thought (CoT) logic. To support this evaluation, we construct a dataset to elicit the spatial-temporal reasoning process of Video-LLMs. It contains coarse-to-fine CoT questions generated by a semi-automated GPT-4-powered pipeline, embedding explicit reasoning chains to mimic human cognition. Experiments from 14 Video-LLMs on our V-STaR reveal significant gaps between current Video-LLMs and the needs for robust and consistent spatio-temporal reasoning.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 14, 2025 2

Video-Thinker: Sparking "Thinking with Videos" via Reinforcement Learning

Recent advances in image reasoning methods, particularly "Thinking with Images", have demonstrated remarkable success in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs); however, this dynamic reasoning paradigm has not yet been extended to video reasoning tasks. In this paper, we propose Video-Thinker, which empowers MLLMs to think with videos by autonomously leveraging their intrinsic "grounding" and "captioning" capabilities to generate reasoning clues throughout the inference process. To spark this capability, we construct Video-Thinker-10K, a curated dataset featuring autonomous tool usage within chain-of-thought reasoning sequences. Our training strategy begins with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to learn the reasoning format, followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to strengthen this reasoning capability. Through this approach, Video-Thinker enables MLLMs to autonomously navigate grounding and captioning tasks for video reasoning, eliminating the need for constructing and calling external tools. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Video-Thinker achieves significant performance gains on both in-domain tasks and challenging out-of-domain video reasoning benchmarks, including Video-Holmes, CG-Bench-Reasoning, and VRBench. Our Video-Thinker-7B substantially outperforms existing baselines such as Video-R1 and establishes state-of-the-art performance among 7B-sized MLLMs.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 27, 2025 1

VisionCoach: Reinforcing Grounded Video Reasoning via Visual-Perception Prompting

Video reasoning requires models to locate and track question-relevant evidence across frames. While reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards improves accuracy, it still struggles to achieve reliable spatio-temporal grounding during the reasoning process. Moreover, improving grounding typically relies on scaled training data or inference-time perception tools, which increases annotation cost or computational cost. To address this challenge, we propose VisonCoach, an input-adaptive RL framework that improves spatio-temporal grounding through visual prompting as training-time guidance. During RL training, visual prompts are selectively applied to challenging inputs to amplify question-relevant evidence and suppress distractors. The model then internalizes these improvements through self-distillation, enabling grounded reasoning directly on raw videos without visual prompting at inference. VisonCoach consists of two components: (1) Visual Prompt Selector, which predicts appropriate prompt types conditioned on the video and question, and (2) Spatio-Temporal Reasoner, optimized with RL under visual prompt guidance and object-aware grounding rewards that enforce object identity consistency and multi-region bounding-box overlap. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VisonCoach achieves state-of-the-art performance under comparable settings, across diverse video reasoning, video understanding, and temporal grounding benchmarks (V-STAR, VideoMME, World-Sense, VideoMMMU, PerceptionTest, and Charades-STA), while maintaining a single efficient inference pathway without external tools. Our results show that visual prompting during training improves grounded video reasoning, while self-distillation enables the model to internalize this ability without requiring prompts at inference time.

Reasoning via Video: The First Evaluation of Video Models' Reasoning Abilities through Maze-Solving Tasks

Video Models have achieved remarkable success in high-fidelity video generation with coherent motion dynamics. Analogous to the development from text generation to text-based reasoning in language modeling, the development of video models motivates us to ask: Can video models reason via video generation? Compared with the discrete text corpus, video grounds reasoning in explicit spatial layouts and temporal continuity, which serves as an ideal substrate for spatial reasoning. In this work, we explore the reasoning via video paradigm and introduce VR-Bench -- a comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically evaluate video models' reasoning capabilities. Grounded in maze-solving tasks that inherently require spatial planning and multi-step reasoning, VR-Bench contains 7,920 procedurally generated videos across five maze types and diverse visual styles. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that SFT can efficiently elicit the reasoning ability of video model. Video models exhibit stronger spatial perception during reasoning, outperforming leading VLMs and generalizing well across diverse scenarios, tasks, and levels of complexity. We further discover a test-time scaling effect, where diverse sampling during inference improves reasoning reliability by 10--20%. These findings highlight the unique potential and scalability of reasoning via video for spatial reasoning tasks.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 18, 2025 4

OpenCoF: Learning to Reason Through Video Generation

Reasoning has become a core capability for large models, especially when reliable decisions require understanding logical consequences. Recent video generation models offer a reasoning path distinct from previous Chain-of-Thought (CoT): reasoning can unfold through temporally connected frames, known as Chain-of-Frame (CoF) reasoning. However, existing video generators are primarily trained on general video corpora, still lacking diverse supervision and dedicated designs for CoF reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce OpenCoF, a framework comprising the OpenCoF-17K dataset, a reasoning video dataset spanning 11 task families, and Wan-CoF, a fine-tuned video model for studying whether diverse temporal supervision improves CoF behavior. Across four video reasoning benchmarks, Wan-CoF achieves considerable gains over the Wan2.2-I2V-A14B baseline. Building on this, we empirically explore more advanced designs for CoF capabilities, i.e., equipping the model with visual and textual reasoning tokens. This mechanism respectively captures low-level visual cues and high-level semantic priors for spatial and temporal reasoning. Through performance comparisons and attention analysis, we examine how these tokens contribute across model depth, denoising steps, space, and time. Our results suggest that stronger video reasoning requires both broad temporal supervision and explicit mechanisms for organizing intermediate reasoning state. We open-source the dataset, model, and code to facilitate future research on reasoning-oriented video generation.

PerceptionComp: A Video Benchmark for Complex Perception-Centric Reasoning

We introduce PerceptionComp, a manually annotated benchmark for complex, long-horizon, perception-centric video reasoning. PerceptionComp is designed so that no single moment is sufficient: answering each question requires multiple temporally separated pieces of visual evidence and compositional constraints under conjunctive and sequential logic, spanning perceptual subtasks such as objects, attributes, relations, locations, actions, and events, and requiring skills including semantic recognition, visual correspondence, temporal reasoning, and spatial reasoning. The benchmark contains 1,114 highly complex questions on 279 videos from diverse domains including city walk tours, indoor villa tours, video games, and extreme outdoor sports, with 100% manual annotation. Human studies show that PerceptionComp requires substantial test-time thinking and repeated perception steps: participants take much longer than on prior benchmarks, and accuracy drops to near chance (18.97%) when rewatching is disallowed. State-of-the-art MLLMs also perform substantially worse on PerceptionComp than on existing benchmarks: the best model in our evaluation, Gemini-3-Flash, reaches only 45.96% accuracy in the five-choice setting, while open-source models remain below 40%. These results suggest that perception-centric long-horizon video reasoning remains a major bottleneck, and we hope PerceptionComp will help drive progress in perceptual reasoning.

  • 12 authors
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Mar 27 2

VidEgoThink: Assessing Egocentric Video Understanding Capabilities for Embodied AI

Recent advancements in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have opened new avenues for applications in Embodied AI. Building on previous work, EgoThink, we introduce VidEgoThink, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating egocentric video understanding capabilities. To bridge the gap between MLLMs and low-level control in Embodied AI, we design four key interrelated tasks: video question-answering, hierarchy planning, visual grounding and reward modeling. To minimize manual annotation costs, we develop an automatic data generation pipeline based on the Ego4D dataset, leveraging the prior knowledge and multimodal capabilities of GPT-4o. Three human annotators then filter the generated data to ensure diversity and quality, resulting in the VidEgoThink benchmark. We conduct extensive experiments with three types of models: API-based MLLMs, open-source image-based MLLMs, and open-source video-based MLLMs. Experimental results indicate that all MLLMs, including GPT-4o, perform poorly across all tasks related to egocentric video understanding. These findings suggest that foundation models still require significant advancements to be effectively applied to first-person scenarios in Embodied AI. In conclusion, VidEgoThink reflects a research trend towards employing MLLMs for egocentric vision, akin to human capabilities, enabling active observation and interaction in the complex real-world environments.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 15, 2024 3

VCR-Bench: A Comprehensive Evaluation Framework for Video Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

The advancement of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly enhanced the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, a rigorous evaluation framework for video CoT reasoning remains absent. Current video benchmarks fail to adequately assess the reasoning process and expose whether failures stem from deficiencies in perception or reasoning capabilities. Therefore, we introduce VCR-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to comprehensively evaluate LVLMs' Video Chain-of-Thought Reasoning capabilities. VCR-Bench comprises 859 videos spanning a variety of video content and durations, along with 1,034 high-quality question-answer pairs. Each pair is manually annotated with a stepwise CoT rationale, where every step is tagged to indicate its association with the perception or reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, we design seven distinct task dimensions and propose the CoT score to assess the entire CoT process based on the stepwise tagged CoT rationals. Extensive experiments on VCR-Bench highlight substantial limitations in current LVLMs. Even the top-performing model, o1, only achieves a 62.8% CoT score and an 56.7% accuracy, while most models score below 40%. Experiments show most models score lower on perception than reasoning steps, revealing LVLMs' key bottleneck in temporal-spatial information processing for complex video reasoning. A robust positive correlation between the CoT score and accuracy confirms the validity of our evaluation framework and underscores the critical role of CoT reasoning in solving complex video reasoning tasks. We hope VCR-Bench to serve as a standardized evaluation framework and expose the actual drawbacks in complex video reasoning task.

  • 10 authors
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Apr 10, 2025 2

CollabVR: Collaborative Video Reasoning with Vision-Language and Video Generation Models

Recent "Thinking with Video" approaches use Video Generation Models (VGMs) for visual reasoning by producing temporally coherent Chain-of-Frames as reasoning artifacts. Even strong VGMs, however, exhibit two recurring failure modes on goal-directed tasks: long-horizon drift on multi-step tasks and mid-clip simulation errors that compound. Both stem from the absence of explicit reasoning built upon the VGM's short-horizon visual prior, a role naturally filled by Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but where to place the VLM is non-trivial: upfront plans commit before any frame is generated and post-hoc critiques over whole videos intervene too late. We propose VLM-VGM Collaborative Video Reasoning (CollabVR), a closed-loop framework that couples the VLM with the VGM at step-level granularity: the VLM plans the immediate next action, inspects the clip the VGM generates, and folds the verifier's diagnosis directly into the next action prompt to repair detected failures. On Gen-ViRe and VBVR-Bench, CollabVR improves both open-source and closed-source VGMs over single-inference, Pass@k, and prior test-time scaling baselines at matched compute, with the largest gains on the hardest tasks. It also yields further improvements on top of a reasoning-fine-tuned VGM, indicating that step-level VLM supervision is orthogonal to and stackable with reasoning-oriented fine-tuning. We provide video samples and additional qualitative results at our project page: https://joow0n-kim.github.io/collabvr-project-page.

kaist-ai KAIST AI
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May 8 1

SAGE: Training Smart Any-Horizon Agents for Long Video Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning

As humans, we are natural any-horizon reasoners, i.e., we can decide whether to iteratively skim long videos or watch short ones in full when necessary for a given task. With this in mind, one would expect video reasoning models to reason flexibly across different durations. However, SOTA models are still trained to predict answers in a single turn while processing a large number of frames, akin to watching an entire long video, requiring significant resources. This raises the question: Is it possible to develop performant any-horizon video reasoning systems? Inspired by human behavior, we first propose SAGE, an agent system that performs multi-turn reasoning on long videos while handling simpler problems in a single turn. Secondly, we introduce an easy synthetic data generation pipeline using Gemini-2.5-Flash to train the orchestrator, SAGE-MM, which lies at the core of SAGE. We further propose an effective RL post-training recipe essential for instilling any-horizon reasoning ability in SAGE-MM. Thirdly, we curate SAGE-Bench with an average duration of greater than 700 seconds for evaluating video reasoning ability in real-world entertainment use cases. Lastly, we empirically validate the effectiveness of our system, data, and RL recipe, observing notable improvements of up to 6.1% on open-ended video reasoning tasks, as well as an impressive 8.2% improvement on videos longer than 10 minutes.

allenai Ai2
·
Dec 15, 2025 2

E^3C: Video Generation with 3D Environmental Memory and Ego-Exo Human Pose Control

Controllable and physically grounded egocentric video generation is essential for embodied agents to reason about how their own and others' actions manifest and change the world. Compared to generic video synthesis, egocentric generation is especially challenging: the camera is tightly coupled to the actor, leading to rapid viewpoint changes and frequent self-occlusions; the underlying actions are subtle, articulated, and often only partially visible; and both the people and the scene state must evolve consistently with the specified controls. We present E^3C, a controllable video diffusion framework for egocentric generation that builds structured and compact conditions disentangling persistent scene structure from human-driven dynamics. From context frames, E^3C constructs a semi-dense point cloud-based 3D memory and augments each point with appearance descriptors from video-VAE features. Rendering this memory into target viewpoints produces conditioning aligned with the target frames. Human dynamics are modeled separately. The observed people in the scene are controlled by skeleton renderings (exo human control), while the camera wearer is specified by their 3D body joints and 6DoF wrist motion (ego human control). To preserve ego human control when the wearer's body parts are invisible, we introduce an ego motion encoder that produces persistent cross-attention tokens. Experiments on Nymeria show that E^3C improves visual fidelity, camera-motion accuracy, object consistency, and ego & exo human control over strong baselines, while also enabling intuitive scene editing.

  • 6 authors
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May 24

LifelongMemory: Leveraging LLMs for Answering Queries in Egocentric Videos

The egocentric video natural language query (NLQ) task involves localizing a temporal window in an egocentric video that provides an answer to a posed query, which has wide applications in building personalized AI assistants. Prior methods for this task have focused on improvements of network architecture and leveraging pre-training for enhanced image and video features, but have struggled with capturing long-range temporal dependencies in lengthy videos, and cumbersome end-to-end training. Motivated by recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and vision language models, we introduce LifelongMemory, a novel framework that utilizes multiple pre-trained models to answer queries from extensive egocentric video content. We address the unique challenge by employing a pre-trained captioning model to create detailed narratives of the videos. These narratives are then used to prompt a frozen LLM to generate coarse-grained temporal window predictions, which are subsequently refined using a pre-trained NLQ model. Empirical results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance against existing supervised end-to-end learning methods, underlining the potential of integrating multiple pre-trained multimodal large language models in complex vision-language tasks. We provide a comprehensive analysis of key design decisions and hyperparameters in our pipeline, offering insights and practical guidelines.

  • 3 authors
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Dec 7, 2023