EgoErrorVQA: Assess Egocentric Comprehension Capabilities through Procedural Errors for Ego-Agentic AI

Junlong li, Junxi LI, Jianjun Gao, Chen Cai, Lap-Pui Chau, Yi Wang


Abstract
The majority of our everyday activities are procedural and consist of sequences of interdependent steps. However, existing benchmarks for Visual Agents and Visual Language Models (VLMs) overlook the evaluation of their procedural comprehension ability from an egocentric visual perspective, particularly for detecting procedural errors, a critical capability for everyday assistance. To bridge this gap, the EgoErrorVQA task is firstly proposed for egocentric procedural comprehension with explicit procedural errors modeling. Besides, we develop a user-friendly evaluator agent based on the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, enabling rigorous and standardized evaluation of visual agents through VQA-based interaction. A range of models are evaluated using both open-ended and multiple-choice questions, revealing persistent weaknesses in handling procedural errors and error types. Moreover, we introduce Ego-ADR, an Adaptive Decoupled Reasoning framework that decouples complex procedural reasoning to enhance models’ understanding of procedural errors. It achieves consistent performance gains over the selected baselines and attains state-of-the-art results on several metrics under comparable settings. Code: https://github.com/z1oong/EgoErrorVQA
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.946
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
19939–19959
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.946/
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Cite (ACL):
Junlong li, Junxi LI, Jianjun Gao, Chen Cai, Lap-Pui Chau, and Yi Wang. 2026. EgoErrorVQA: Assess Egocentric Comprehension Capabilities through Procedural Errors for Ego-Agentic AI. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 19939–19959, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
EgoErrorVQA: Assess Egocentric Comprehension Capabilities through Procedural Errors for Ego-Agentic AI (li et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.946.pdf