EgoThinker: Unveiling Egocentric Reasoning with Spatio-Temporal CoT

Baoqi Pei, Yifei Huang, Jilan Xu, Yuping He, Guo Chen, Fei Wu, Jiangmiao Pang, Yu Qiao

Keywords: egocentric video, video reasoning, multimodal large language models

Abstract: Egocentric video reasoning centers on an unobservable agent behind the camera who dynamically shapes the environment, requiring inference of hidden intentions and recognition of fine-grained interactions. This core challenge limits current multimodal large language models (MLLMs), which excel at visible event reasoning but lack embodied, first-person understanding. To bridge this gap, we introduce EgoThinker, a novel framework that endows MLLMs with robust egocentric reasoning capabilities through spatio-temporal chain-of-thought supervision and a two-stage learning curriculum. First, we introduce EgoRe-5M, a large-scale egocentric QA dataset constructed from 13M diverse egocentric video clips. This dataset features multi-minute segments annotated with detailed CoT rationales and dense hand–object grounding. Second, we employ SFT on EgoRe-5M to instill reasoning skills, followed by reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) to further enhance spatio-temporal localization. Experimental results show that EgoThinker outperforms existing methods across multiple egocentric benchmarks, while achieving substantial improvements in fine-grained spatio-temporal localization tasks.

Primary Area: Applications (e.g., vision, language, speech and audio, Creative AI)

Submission Number: 5074