REVIEW 3 major objections 4 minor 1 cited by
Technical Report for Ego4D Long-Term Action Anticipation Challenge 2025
T0 review · 3 major / 4 minor · reviewed 2026-08-07 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read The paper claims a three-stage framework with hand-object cues and a verb-noun co-occurrence matrix wins the Ego4D 2025 long-term action anticipation challenge with a 0.8493 action edit distance.
desk verdict A plausible first-place leaderboard result with an unsupported story: the two new components are never ablated, and the recognition accuracy in Table 2 is actually worse than the baseline. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The load-bearing piece is the verb-noun co-occurrence matrix, a normalized table of how often verb-noun pairs appear together in the training data; the recognizer multiplies the Transformer's top-five verb and noun probability distributions by this matrix to form the most plausible verb-noun pairs. A second supporting piece is the hand-object interaction branch: a segmentation model isolates hand-object regions, whose features are encoded separately and fused with whole-frame features by a lightweight MLP. These enriched features and reweighted predictions feed the anticipation stage, where a fine-tuned Llama2-7B receives the recognized actions as a textual prompt and generates the future 20 actions.
What would settle it
Run the identical pipeline on the Ego4D v2 test set with the hand-object branch removed and the co-occurrence matrix replaced by a uniform one; if the action edit distance stays at or near 0.8493, the claim that these additions are responsible for the gain is falsified.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The central claim is that the proposed framework—the EgoVideo-V visual encoder, a SAM2-derived hand-object feature stream fused via an MLP, a Transformer recognizer that uses a verb-noun co-occurrence matrix to select top-five verb-noun pairs, and a fine-tuned Llama2-7B that turns those pairs into a 20-step future action sequence—produces the best reported action anticipation results on the Ego4D v2 test set. The paper reports verb, noun, and action edit distances of 0.6346, 0.5986, and 0.8493 respectively, ranking first on the public leaderboard. The authors argue that the co-occurrence matrix and hand-object cues improve recognition accuracy, and that this improved recognition propagates to the LLM stage, so the whole pipeline outperforms both the PALM and AntGPT baselines and the runner-up EgoVideo-based system.
Load-bearing premise
The paper never tests whether the two proposed additions—hand-object cues and the co-occurrence matrix—actually contribute anything, because its ablations only swap the visual encoder and the LLM, so the claim that these components drive the first-place result rests on an untested assumption.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- The best LTA performance on Ego4D v2 now comes from combining an egocentric visual encoder with an explicit hand-object prior and a verb-noun co-occurrence prior, not from the language model alone.
- Fine-tuned Llama2-7B can produce a plausible 20-action future sequence from a textual history of recognized verb-noun pairs, and its output quality is bounded by the quality of the recognition stage.
- Higher action recognition accuracy alone does not guarantee better anticipation: the paper's method has lower recognition accuracy than the fine-tuned EgoVideo baseline yet lower (better) action edit distance.
- The co-occurrence matrix approach transfers from the QueryMamba system to a Transformer recognizer and improves verb-noun pair selection.
Reading between the lines
- Because no ablation removes the hand-object branch or the co-occurrence matrix, the leaderboard gain could partly come from the choice of EgoVideo-V or the Llama2 fine-tuning recipe; an ablation isolating these two components would settle that.
- The verb-noun co-occurrence matrix is a cheap, model-agnostic prior that could be dropped into other egocentric verb-noun recognition or anticipation systems regardless of the LLM stage.
- One testable extension is to replace the SAM2 hand-object features with other segmentation or hand-detection cues to see whether the gain is specific to that segmentation model or generic to hand-object grounding.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. This manuscript is a challenge technical report describing a three-stage framework for Ego4D Long-Term Action Anticipation: (1) feature extraction with EgoVideo-V and SAM2-based hand-object interaction features, (2) action recognition with a Transformer plus a verb-noun co-occurrence matrix, and (3) long-term anticipation with a fine-tuned Llama2-7B that converts recognized verb-noun pairs into textual prompts. The paper reports first place on the Ego4D v2 LTA leaderboard at CVPR 2025, with an action Edit Distance of 0.8493 (verb ED 0.6346, noun ED 0.5986), and compares against PALM, AntGPT, EgoVideo, and six leaderboard teams. Section 3.2 provides an ablation across visual encoders and LLMs, and Section 3.3 gives qualitative case studies. The central claim is the first-place rank and its attribution to the proposed components, but the experimental evidence for that attribution is incomplete.
Significance. If the first-place result and its attribution are valid, the paper would demonstrate that a recognition-stage enhanced with hand-object cues and co-occurrence reranking, followed by a fine-tuned LLM, can achieve state-of-the-art long-term action anticipation on the Ego4D benchmark. The strength of the paper is that the final score is an externally validated leaderboard result, and the comparison against PALM and AntGPT is useful. However, the proposed components are never isolated, the recognition-stage accuracy reported for the main configuration is lower than the EgoVideo baseline while the LTA score is better, and no variance or significance analysis accompanies a 0.0011 ED margin. These issues mean the method's contribution is currently not established, even if the reported rank is correct.
major comments (3)
- [Section 3.2 / Table 2] The central attribution of the first-place result is unsupported. Table 2 is explicitly described as ablating visual encoders and inference LLMs, and neither the SAM2 hand-object fusion (Section 2.1) nor the verb-noun co-occurrence reranker (Section 2.2) is removed in any row. All "Ours" rows contain both components, so the comparison between any baseline and "Ours" changes the recognition stage, the LLM, and the two proposed additions simultaneously. Without at least one configuration that disables each proposed component separately and jointly, the statement in Section 3.2 that "combining improvements across all three stages" yields the result does not follow from the data; the first-place ranking could hold even if both additions contribute nothing. Please add ablations that drop the SAM2 fusion and the co-occurrence matrix.
- [Section 3.2 / Table 2] The recognition-accuracy discussion is contradicted by the table. The "Ours (EgoVideo-V)" row reports 22.15% action recognition accuracy, which is 5.49 points below the fine-tuned EgoVideo-V baseline's 27.64% and only 1.52 points above the EgoVLP sliding-window baseline of 20.63%. Calling this "slightly lower" is misleading, and the sentence that "the advanced EgoVideo-V achieves the highest action recognition accuracy, reaching 22.15%" is only true among the two Ours rows, not among all methods in the table. Since the LTA improvement (0.8504 to 0.8493) occurs despite a worse recognition stage, the gain cannot be attributed to improved recognition accuracy as Section 1 and Section 3.2 claim; the improvement must come from the LLM, the reranker, or benchmark variation. The text needs to be corrected and the cause identified through controlled experiments.
- [Section 3.1 / Table 1] The margin over the runner-up is 0.0011 in action Edit Distance (0.8493 vs. 0.8504), and the paper reports no variance estimate, confidence interval, or multiple-run analysis. The first-place rank is an externally reported leaderboard fact, but the claim that the specific proposed configuration is superior by a stable margin is not supported by any statistical evidence. If the leaderboard is based on a single fixed test-set evaluation, state this explicitly; otherwise, provide repeated-run statistics or otherwise justify that a 0.0011 difference is meaningful rather than noise.
minor comments (4)
- [Figure 1 caption] The caption describes the pipeline as a "two-stage pipeline," but the abstract, introduction, and methodology all describe a three-stage framework; the caption should be corrected.
- [Table 1] Table 1 has formatting errors that make it hard to read: the "BigMac (mtp)" row renders as "30.63400.6395 0.8649" without separators, and the team label "Ours (iLearn2.O)" is inconsistent with the naming used elsewhere. Please fix the table formatting and unify the team/method names.
- [Section 2.2] The verb-noun co-occurrence matrix is central to the method, but the paper does not describe how the matrix is estimated, normalized, or integrated with the Transformer probabilities; adding a formal description or a small equation would substantially improve reproducibility.
- [Abstract / Section 3.2] The abstract promises that code will be released, but no code, checkpoints, or detailed hyperparameters are included in the report; please clarify the intended release date and provide enough configuration detail for the experimental claims to be reproduced.
Circularity Check
No circularity found: the central result is an external leaderboard outcome, and the unablated component claims are a support issue, not a circular reduction.
full rationale
This paper is a challenge technical report describing a three-stage pipeline for Ego4D LTA. Its central claim, first place with LTA Edit Distance 0.8493, is validated by an external public leaderboard, not by any derivation from the method's own assumptions. The method builds on prior external work (PALM, AntGPT, EgoVideo-V, SAM2, QueryMamba) rather than on self-citations that carry the argument. The intro cites several works by the same group, but none of those citations supplies a load-bearing premise or forbids alternatives, so they do not constitute circularity. The main weakness is that Table 2 does not ablate the SAM2 hand-object fusion or the co-occurrence reranker, and Section 3.2 attributes gains to these components despite the recognition accuracy being lower than the EgoVideo-V baseline. However, missing ablations and an unsupported attribution are concerns about evidence quality, not about a derivation being equivalent to its inputs. No equation is fitted to the predicted quantity, no fitted parameter is renamed as a prediction, and no uniqueness theorem is imported from the authors' own prior work. Therefore, under the stated rules, there is no specific circular step to report, and the circularity score is 0.
Assumptions & free parameters
free parameters (3)
- verb-noun co-occurrence matrix =
estimated from Ego4D training data (details not reported)
- top-k candidate count =
5
- frames per segment =
4
assumptions (4)
- domain assumption EgoVideo-V visual features contain sufficient information for verb and noun recognition.
- domain assumption Verb-noun co-occurrence statistics from training data generalize to the test distribution.
- domain assumption Fine-tuned Llama 2 can generate coherent chronological action sequences from observed action text.
- domain assumption SAM2 accurately localizes hand-object interactions relevant to future actions.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Technical Report for Ego4D Long-Term Action Anticipation Challenge 2025." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/MD2ULJV5
@misc{pith2026250602550,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Technical Report for Ego4D Long-Term Action Anticipation Challenge 2025},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/MD2ULJV5}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2506.02550}
}
read the original abstract
In this report, we present a novel three-stage framework developed for the Ego4D Long-Term Action Anticipation (LTA) task. Inspired by recent advances in foundation models, our method consists of three stages: feature extraction, action recognition, and long-term action anticipation. First, visual features are extracted using a high-performance visual encoder. The features are then fed into a Transformer to predict verbs and nouns, with a verb-noun co-occurrence matrix incorporated to enhance recognition accuracy. Finally, the predicted verb-noun pairs are formatted as textual prompts and input into a fine-tuned large language model (LLM) to anticipate future action sequences. Our framework achieves first place in this challenge at CVPR 2025, establishing a new state-of-the-art in long-term action prediction. Our code will be released at https://github.com/CorrineQiu/Ego4D-LTA-Challenge-2025.
Figures
Forward citations
Cited by 1 Pith paper
-
OSGNet @ Ego4D Episodic Memory Challenge 2025
OSGNet, an early-fusion grounding model, wins all three Ego4D Episodic Memory Challenge tracks by converting localization tasks into retrieval problems.
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
Videollm: Modeling video sequence with large language models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.13292, 2023
Guo Chen, Yin-Dong Zheng, Jiahao Wang, Jilan Xu, Yifei Huang, Junting Pan, Yi Wang, Yali Wang, Yu Qiao, Tong Lu, et al. Videollm: Modeling video sequence with large language models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.13292, 2023. 3
arXiv 2023
-
[2]
Objectnlq@ ego4d episodic memory challenge 2024.arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.15778, 2024
Yisen Feng, Haoyu Zhang, Yuquan Xie, Zaijing Li, Meng Liu, and Liqiang Nie. Objectnlq@ ego4d episodic memory challenge 2024.arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.15778, 2024. 1
arXiv 2024
-
[3]
Object-shot enhanced grounding network for egocentric video.arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.04270, 2025
Yisen Feng, Haoyu Zhang, Meng Liu, Weili Guan, and Liqiang Nie. Object-shot enhanced grounding network for egocentric video.arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.04270, 2025. 1
arXiv 2025
-
[4]
Ego4d: Around the world in 3,000 hours of egocentric video
Kristen Grauman, Andrew Westbury, Eugene Byrne, Zachary Chavis, Antonino Furnari, Rohit Girdhar, Jackson Hamburger, Hao Jiang, Miao Liu, Xingyu Liu, et al. Ego4d: Around the world in 3,000 hours of egocentric video. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vi- sion and pattern recognition, pages 18995–19012, 2022. 1
2022
-
[5]
Bi-directional het- erogeneous graph hashing towards efficient outfit recom- mendation
Weili Guan, Xuemeng Song, Haoyu Zhang, Meng Liu, Chung-Hsing Yeh, and Xiaojun Chang. Bi-directional het- erogeneous graph hashing towards efficient outfit recom- mendation. InProceedings of the 30th ACM international conference on multimedia, pages 268–276, 2022. 1
2022
-
[6]
Daoji Huang, Otmar Hilliges, Luc Van Gool, and Xi Wang. Palm: Predicting actions through language models@ ego4d long-term action anticipation challenge 2023.arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.16545, 2023. 1, 3
arXiv 2023
-
[7]
Palm: Predicting actions through language models
Sanghwan Kim, Daoji Huang, Yongqin Xian, Otmar Hilliges, Luc Van Gool, and Xi Wang. Palm: Predicting actions through language models. InEuropean Conference on Computer Vision, pages 140–158. Springer, 2024. 3, 4
work page 2024
-
[8]
Kevin Qinghong Lin, Jinpeng Wang, Mattia Soldan, Michael Wray, Rui Yan, Eric Z Xu, Difei Gao, Rong-Cheng Tu, Wen- zhe Zhao, Weijie Kong, et al. Egocentric video-language pretraining.Advances in Neural Information Processing Sys- tems, 35:7575–7586, 2022. 2, 4
work page 2022
Show all 24 references
-
[9]
Attentive moment retrieval in videos
Meng Liu, Xiang Wang, Liqiang Nie, Xiangnan He, Bao- quan Chen, and Tat-Seng Chua. Attentive moment retrieval in videos. InThe 41st international ACM SIGIR conference on research & development in information retrieval, pages 15–24, 2018. 1
2018
-
[10]
Cross-modal moment localiza- tion in videos
Meng Liu, Xiang Wang, Liqiang Nie, Qi Tian, Baoquan Chen, and Tat-Seng Chua. Cross-modal moment localiza- tion in videos. InProceedings of the 26th ACM international conference on Multimedia, pages 843–851, 2018. 1
2018
-
[11]
Egovideo: Exploring egocentric founda- tion model and downstream adaptation.arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.18070, 2024
Baoqi Pei, Guo Chen, Jilan Xu, Yuping He, Yicheng Liu, Kanghua Pan, Yifei Huang, Yali Wang, Tong Lu, Limin Wang, et al. Egovideo: Exploring egocentric founda- tion model and downstream adaptation.arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.18070, 2024. 2, 3, 4
2024 arXiv
-
[12]
Sam 2: Segment anything in images and videos.arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.00714, 2024
Nikhila Ravi, Valentin Gabeur, Yuan-Ting Hu, Ronghang Hu, Chaitanya Ryali, Tengyu Ma, Haitham Khedr, Roman R¨adle, Chloe Rolland, Laura Gustafson, et al. Sam 2: Segment anything in images and videos.arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.00714, 2024. 2
2024 arXiv
-
[13]
Llama 2: Open foundation and fine-tuned chat models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.09288, 2023
Hugo Touvron, Louis Martin, Kevin Stone, Peter Albert, Amjad Almahairi, Yasmine Babaei, Nikolay Bashlykov, Soumya Batra, Prajjwal Bhargava, Shruti Bhosale, et al. Llama 2: Open foundation and fine-tuned chat models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.09288, 2023. 1, 4
2023 arXiv
-
[14]
Time: Temporal-sensitive multi-dimensional instruc- tion tuning and benchmarking for video-llms.arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.09994, 2025
Yunxiao Wang, Meng Liu, Rui Shao, Haoyu Zhang, Bin Wen, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Di Zhang, and Liqiang Nie. Time: Temporal-sensitive multi-dimensional instruc- tion tuning and benchmarking for video-llms.arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.09994, 2025. 1
2025 arXiv
-
[15]
Multimodal dialog system: Rela- tional graph-based context-aware question understanding
Haoyu Zhang, Meng Liu, Zan Gao, Xiaoqiang Lei, Yinglong Wang, and Liqiang Nie. Multimodal dialog system: Rela- tional graph-based context-aware question understanding. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM international conference on multimedia, pages 695–703, 2021. 1
2021
-
[16]
Attribute-guided collab- orative learning for partial person re-identification.IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 45(12):14144–14160, 2023
Haoyu Zhang, Meng Liu, Yuhong Li, Ming Yan, Zan Gao, Xiaojun Chang, and Liqiang Nie. Attribute-guided collab- orative learning for partial person re-identification.IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 45(12):14144–14160, 2023. 1
2023
-
[17]
Uncovering hidden connections: Iterative tracking and reasoning for video-grounded dialog
Haoyu Zhang, Meng Liu, Yaowei Wang, Da Cao, Weili Guan, and Liqiang Nie. Uncovering hidden connections: Iterative tracking and reasoning for video-grounded dialog. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.07259, 2023. 1
2023 arXiv
-
[18]
Multi-factor adaptive vision selec- tion for egocentric video question answering
Haoyu Zhang, Meng Liu, Zixin Liu, Xuemeng Song, Yaowei Wang, and Liqiang Nie. Multi-factor adaptive vision selec- tion for egocentric video question answering. InProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning, pages 59310–59328. PMLR, 2024. 1
2024
-
[19]
Hcqa@ ego4d egoschema challenge 2024.arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.15771, 2024
Haoyu Zhang, Yuquan Xie, Yisen Feng, Zaijing Li, Meng Liu, and Liqiang Nie. Hcqa@ ego4d egoschema challenge 2024.arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.15771, 2024. 1
2024 arXiv
-
[20]
Exo2ego: Exocentric knowledge guided mllm for egocentric video understanding.arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.09143, 2025
Haoyu Zhang, Qiaohui Chu, Meng Liu, Yunxiao Wang, Bin Wen, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Di Zhang, Yaowei Wang, and Liqiang Nie. Exo2ego: Exocentric knowledge guided mllm for egocentric video understanding.arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.09143, 2025. 1
2025
-
[21]
Hcqa- 1.5@ ego4d egoschema challenge 2025.arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.20644, 2025
Haoyu Zhang, Yisen Feng, Qiaohui Chu, Meng Liu, Weili Guan, Yaowei Wang, and Liqiang Nie. Hcqa- 1.5@ ego4d egoschema challenge 2025.arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.20644, 2025. 1
2025 arXiv
-
[22]
Antgpt: Can large language models help long- term action anticipation from videos?arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.16368, 2023
Qi Zhao, Shijie Wang, Ce Zhang, Changcheng Fu, Minh Quan Do, Nakul Agarwal, Kwonjoon Lee, and Chen Sun. Antgpt: Can large language models help long- term action anticipation from videos?arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.16368, 2023. 2, 3
2023 arXiv
-
[23]
Judging llm-as-a-judge with mt-bench and chatbot arena.Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 36:46595–46623, 2023
Lianmin Zheng, Wei-Lin Chiang, Ying Sheng, Siyuan Zhuang, Zhanghao Wu, Yonghao Zhuang, Zi Lin, Zhuohan Li, Dacheng Li, Eric Xing, et al. Judging llm-as-a-judge with mt-bench and chatbot arena.Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 36:46595–46623, 2023. 2, 4
2023
-
[24]
Zeyun Zhong, Manuel Martin, Frederik Diederichs, and Juergen Beyerer. Querymamba: A mamba-based encoder- decoder architecture with a statistical verb-noun interac- tion module for video action forecasting@ ego4d long- term action anticipation challenge 2024.arXiv preprint arXi...
2024 arXiv
Reviewed August 7, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.