FPV@IPLAB - Department of Mathematics and Computer Science - University of Catania - Italy, Next Vision s.r.l. - Catania - Italy
Abstract:Continuous episodic memory is a core capability for autonomous agents operating in dynamic, real-world environments, yet current streaming video benchmarks provide limited tools for diagnosing what models remember and for how long. We introduce Egostream, a diagnostic benchmark for streaming episodic memory evaluation in egocentric vision. \egostream organizes 2,250 curated questions along seven cognitive dimensions: detail, spatial, temporal, event, social, causal, and prospective memory. We introduce the Answer Validity Window (AVW), which specifies the temporal span an answer remains valid as the observed scene evolves. This allows us to expand the questions into 8,528 recall-conditioned evaluations, enabling controlled testing from instant to ultra-long-term recall while separating genuine model forgetting from natural world-state changes. We rigorously establish baseline performance through a unified streaming MLLM framework that compares several state-of-the-art memory-management mechanisms, covering sliding windows, attention sinks, KV-cache pruning, merging, and offloading. Experiments within a unified Qwen3-VL backbone reveal that comparable aggregate accuracies mask starkly different memory profiles. For instance, token pruning preserves fine-grained details and temporal structure significantly better than token merging, while quantized offloading rescues ultra-long-term recall. Ultimately, all mechanisms operate well below real-time (>1s per frame), and top performing methods ceil at about 45% accuracy, exposing critical gaps in current architectures. Egostream provides the diagnostic testbed needed to close these gaps. Project website, news and updates at: https://saroo25.github.io/Egostream/
Abstract:To operate in the physical world, embodied agents must perceive their environment in an "always-on" fashion, selectively accessing the most informative sensors to balance energy constraints and task accuracy. Despite its importance for resource-constrained devices, energy-aware perception remains under-explored, with most prior work assuming unlimited compute. To address this, we introduce Ego-METAS: the first Egocentric online Multimodal Energy-efficient Temporal Action Segmentation benchmark. Ego-METAS provides a unified testbed of more than 100 hours of untrimmed egocentric video from EgoExo4D, CMU-MMAC, and CaptainCook4D, spanning 5 modalities (RGB, audio, gaze, IMU, and monochrome camera). We formulate an online temporal action segmentation task where models must dynamically select which sensors to activate at each timestep while strictly adhering to hardware-representative energy budgets. Alongside the benchmark, we release unified splits, cleaned annotations, pre-extracted features, and a diverse suite of baseline routing policies. Our evaluations show that optimal routing is highly scenario-dependent, and that existing policy-learning methods, designed primarily for trimmed clips, struggle to adapt to continuous, untrimmed environments. However, even simple dynamic fusion of complementary modalities (e.g., via random routing) proves critical for balancing predictive accuracy against strict energy budgets. Ultimately, Ego-METAS provides a standardized foundation to develop robust, cost-aware policies for autonomous, always-on embodied AI.
Abstract:Visual planning asks a model to generate the remaining steps of a procedure in natural language given a partial video context and a goal. Progress on this task is bottlenecked by annotation: clean labeled datasets are small, domain-narrow, and encode a single execution trajectory per example, even though many valid orderings exist. Large-scale instructional video corpora offer orders of magnitude more procedural content, but supervised fine-tuning on pseudo-labels from their noisy ASR narrations propagates segmentation and alignment errors and stays single-trajectory. We identify a key asymmetry: extracting clean step labels from noisy video is hard, but verifying whether a generated step sequence is temporally grounded in ASR transcripts is cheap and scales to millions of videos via precomputed text embeddings. We exploit this asymmetry in RECIPE, which uses grounding quality as a reward for GRPO, turning the noisy corpus into a verifier rather than a label source. The framework applies uniformly to two planner input configurations (Socratic, with a textual history extracted by a frozen VLM, and Video, consuming video tokens directly) and to annotated and weakly supervised regimes. We evaluate on 7 procedural benchmarks using a reference-based LLM-as-judge protocol scoring plans across 6 procedural criteria. RECIPE-RL improves over the base checkpoint at all scales (0.5B, 3B, 7B) and every benchmark, with macro-accuracy gains of +7 to +8 points in-domain and up to +16 points zero-shot. It outperforms supervised fine-tuning on both annotated and pseudo-labeled plans (the latter degrades the base) and remains robust without human annotations. Used as the proposal stage of a prior propose-assess-search planner, it improves over the strongest zero-shot baseline at every horizon on Visual Planning for Assistance, and on COIN it preserves the generation diversity that SFT collapses.
Abstract:In this work, we explore the role of synthetic data in improving the detection of Hand-Object Interactions from egocentric images. Through extensive experimentation and comparative analysis on VISOR, EgoHOS, and ENIGMA-51 datasets, our findings demonstrate the potential of synthetic data to significantly improve HOI detection, particularly when real labeled data are scarce or unavailable. By using synthetic data and only 10% of the real labeled data, we achieve improvements in Overall AP over models trained exclusively on real data, with gains of +5.67% on VISOR, +8.24% on EgoHOS, and +11.69% on ENIGMA-51. Furthermore, we systematically study how aligning synthetic data to specific real-world benchmarks with respect to objects, grasps, and environments, showing that the effectiveness of synthetic data consistently improves with better synthetic-real alignment. As a result of this work, we release a new data generation pipeline and the new HOI-Synth benchmark, which augments existing datasets with synthetic images of hand-object interaction. These data are automatically annotated with hand-object contact states, bounding boxes, and pixel-wise segmentation masks. All data, code, and tools for synthetic data generation are available at: https://fpv-iplab.github.io/HOI-Synth/.
Abstract:Understanding human behavior from complementary egocentric (ego) and exocentric (exo) points of view enables the development of systems that can support workers in industrial environments and enhance their safety. However, progress in this area is hindered by the lack of datasets capturing both views in realistic industrial scenarios. To address this gap, we propose ENIGMA-360, a new ego-exo dataset acquired in a real industrial scenario. The dataset is composed of 180 egocentric and 180 exocentric procedural videos temporally synchronized offering complementary information of the same scene. The 360 videos have been labeled with temporal and spatial annotations, enabling the study of different aspects of human behavior in industrial domain. We provide baseline experiments for 3 foundational tasks for human behavior understanding: 1) Temporal Action Segmentation, 2) Keystep Recognition and 3) Egocentric Human-Object Interaction Detection, showing the limits of state-of-the-art approaches on this challenging scenario. These results highlight the need for new models capable of robust ego-exo understanding in real-world environments. We publicly release the dataset and its annotations at https://fpv-iplab.github.io/ENIGMA-360/.
Abstract:Procedural planning aims to predict a sequence of actions that transforms an initial visual state into a desired goal, a fundamental ability for intelligent agents operating in complex environments. Existing approaches typically rely on large-scale models that learn procedural structures implicitly, resulting in limited sample-efficiency and high computational cost. In this work we introduce ViterbiPlanNet, a principled framework that explicitly integrates procedural knowledge into the learning process through a Differentiable Viterbi Layer (DVL). The DVL embeds a Procedural Knowledge Graph (PKG) directly with the Viterbi decoding algorithm, replacing non-differentiable operations with smooth relaxations that enable end-to-end optimization. This design allows the model to learn through graph-based decoding. Experiments on CrossTask, COIN, and NIV demonstrate that ViterbiPlanNet achieves state-of-the-art performance with an order of magnitude fewer parameters than diffusion- and LLM-based planners. Extensive ablations show that performance gains arise from our differentiable structure-aware training rather than post-hoc refinement, resulting in improved sample efficiency and robustness to shorter unseen horizons. We also address testing inconsistencies establishing a unified testing protocol with consistent splits and evaluation metrics. With this new protocol, we run experiments multiple times and report results using bootstrapping to assess statistical significance.
Abstract:We investigate the feasibility of using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for real-time online episodic memory question answering. While cloud offloading is common, it raises privacy and latency concerns for wearable assistants, hence we investigate implementation on the edge. We integrated streaming constraints into our question answering pipeline, which is structured into two asynchronous threads: a Descriptor Thread that continuously converts video into a lightweight textual memory, and a Question Answering (QA) Thread that reasons over the textual memory to answer queries. Experiments on the QAEgo4D-Closed benchmark analyze the performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) within strict resource boundaries, showing promising results also when compared to clound-based solutions. Specifically, an end-to-end configuration running on a consumer-grade 8GB GPU achieves 51.76% accuracy with a Time-To-First-Token (TTFT) of 0.41s. Scaling to a local enterprise-grade server yields 54.40% accuracy with a TTFT of 0.88s. In comparison, a cloud-based solution obtains an accuracy of 56.00%. These competitive results highlight the potential of edge-based solutions for privacy-preserving episodic memory retrieval.
Abstract:Short Term object-interaction Anticipation consists in detecting the location of the next active objects, the noun and verb categories of the interaction, as well as the time to contact from the observation of egocentric video. This ability is fundamental for wearable assistants to understand user goals and provide timely assistance, or to enable human-robot interaction. In this work, we present a method to improve the performance of STA predictions. Our contributions are two-fold: 1 We propose STAformer and STAformer plus plus, two novel attention-based architectures integrating frame-guided temporal pooling, dual image-video attention, and multiscale feature fusion to support STA predictions from an image-input video pair; 2 We introduce two novel modules to ground STA predictions on human behavior by modeling affordances. First, we integrate an environment affordance model which acts as a persistent memory of interactions that can take place in a given physical scene. We explore how to integrate environment affordances via simple late fusion and with an approach which adaptively learns how to best fuse affordances with end-to-end predictions. Second, we predict interaction hotspots from the observation of hands and object trajectories, increasing confidence in STA predictions localized around the hotspot. Our results show significant improvements on Overall Top-5 mAP, with gain up to +23p.p on Ego4D and +31p.p on a novel set of curated EPIC-Kitchens STA labels. We released the code, annotations, and pre-extracted affordances on Ego4D and EPIC-Kitchens to encourage future research in this area.
Abstract:Skill assessment in procedural videos is crucial for the objective evaluation of human performance in settings such as manufacturing and procedural daily tasks. Current research on skill assessment has predominantly focused on sports and lacks large-scale datasets for complex procedural activities. Existing studies typically involve only a limited number of actions, focus on either pairwise assessments (e.g., A is better than B) or on binary labels (e.g., good execution vs needs improvement). In response to these shortcomings, we introduce ProSkill, the first benchmark dataset for action-level skill assessment in procedural tasks. ProSkill provides absolute skill assessment annotations, along with pairwise ones. This is enabled by a novel and scalable annotation protocol that allows for the creation of an absolute skill assessment ranking starting from pairwise assessments. This protocol leverages a Swiss Tournament scheme for efficient pairwise comparisons, which are then aggregated into consistent, continuous global scores using an ELO-based rating system. We use our dataset to benchmark the main state-of-the-art skill assessment algorithms, including both ranking-based and pairwise paradigms. The suboptimal results achieved by the current state-of-the-art highlight the challenges and thus the value of ProSkill in the context of skill assessment for procedural videos. All data and code are available at https://fpv-iplab.github.io/ProSkill/
Abstract:We present Ego-EXTRA, a video-language Egocentric Dataset for EXpert-TRAinee assistance. Ego-EXTRA features 50 hours of unscripted egocentric videos of subjects performing procedural activities (the trainees) while guided by real-world experts who provide guidance and answer specific questions using natural language. Following a ``Wizard of OZ'' data collection paradigm, the expert enacts a wearable intelligent assistant, looking at the activities performed by the trainee exclusively from their egocentric point of view, answering questions when asked by the trainee, or proactively interacting with suggestions during the procedures. This unique data collection protocol enables Ego-EXTRA to capture a high-quality dialogue in which expert-level feedback is provided to the trainee. Two-way dialogues between experts and trainees are recorded, transcribed, and used to create a novel benchmark comprising more than 15k high-quality Visual Question Answer sets, which we use to evaluate Multimodal Large Language Models. The results show that Ego-EXTRA is challenging and highlight the limitations of current models when used to provide expert-level assistance to the user. The Ego-EXTRA dataset is publicly available to support the benchmark of egocentric video-language assistants: https://fpv-iplab.github.io/Ego-EXTRA/.