# EgoEnv: Human-centric environment representations from egocentric video

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.11365 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11365/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 76 of its 99 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 76)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02523/) (2020)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [TALL: Temporal Activity Localization via Language Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02101/) (2017)
- [Can Spatiotemporal 3D CNNs Retrace the History of 2D CNNs and ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09577/) (2017)
- [Rescaling Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13256/) (2020)
- [Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14405/) (2021)
- [Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10654/) (2018)
- [Learning from Synthetic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01370/) (2017)
- [Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04994/) (2021)
- [BMN: Boundary-Matching Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09702/) (2019)
- [Learning to Explore using Active Neural SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05155/) (2020)
- [Learning 2D Temporal Adjacent Networks for Moment Localization with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03590/) (2019)
- [Learning Correspondence from the Cycle-Consistency of Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07593/) (2019)
- [Masked Visual Pre-training for Motor Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06173/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [An Outlook into the Future of Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07123/) (2023)
- [EgoLM: Multi-Modal Language Model of Egocentric Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18127/) (2024)
- [EgoChoir: Capturing 3D Human-Object Interaction Regions from Egocentric Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13659/) (2024)
- [Vinci: A Real-time Embodied Smart Assistant based on Egocentric Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21080/) (2024)
- [The Invisible EgoHand: 3D Hand Forecasting through EgoBody Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08654/) (2025)
- [Action-slot: Visual Action-centric Representations for Multi-label Atomic Activity Recognition in Traffic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17948/) (2023)
- [Object-Shot Enhanced Grounding Network for Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04270/) (2025)
- [MICA: Multi-Agent Industrial Coordination Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15237/) (2025)
- [Which Viewpoint Shows it Best? Language for Weakly Supervising View Selection in Multi-view Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08753/) (2024)
- [Spherical World-Locking for Audio-Visual Localization in Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05364/) (2024)
- [EgoSplat: Open-Vocabulary Egocentric Scene Understanding with Language Embedded 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11345/) (2025)
- [CARLOR @ Ego4D Step Grounding Challenge: Bayesian temporal-order priors for test time refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09575/) (2024)
- [PARSE-Ego4D: Personal Action Recommendation Suggestions for Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09503/) (2024)
- [EgoAVU: Egocentric Audio-Visual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06139/) (2026)
- [Infusing Environmental Captions for Long-Form Video Language Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02336/) (2024)
- [SneakPeek: Future-Guided Instructional Streaming Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13019/) (2025)
- [DIV-FF: Dynamic Image-Video Feature Fields For Environment Understanding in Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08344/) (2025)
- [Improving Keystep Recognition in Ego-Video via Dexterous Focus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00827/) (2025)
- [DMC3: Dual-Modal Counterfactual Contrastive Construction for Egocentric Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20285/) (2025)
- [Robust Egocentric Visual Attention Prediction Through Language-guided Scene Context-aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01818/) (2026)
- [EgoHRV: Continuous Heart Rate Variability Estimation from Egocentric Systems for Autonomic Response and Skill Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18711/) (2026)
- [AI Smart Glasses for Wearable Intelligence: From Egocentric Sensing to Agentic Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19793/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

First-person video highlights a camera-wearer's activities in the context of their persistent environment. However, current video understanding approaches reason over visual features from short video clips that are detached from the underlying physical space and capture only what is immediately visible. To facilitate human-centric environment understanding, we present an approach that links egocentric video and the environment by learning representations that are predictive of the camera-wearer's (potentially unseen) local surroundings. We train such models using videos from agents in simulated 3D environments where the environment is fully observable, and test them on human-captured real-world videos from unseen environments. On two human-centric video tasks, we show that models equipped with our environment-aware features consistently outperform their counterparts with traditional clip features. Moreover, despite being trained exclusively on simulated videos, our approach successfully handles real-world videos from HouseTours and Ego4D, and achieves state-of-the-art results on the Ego4D NLQ challenge. Project page: https://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/ego-env/