# AntGPT: Can Large Language Models Help Long-term Action Anticipation from Videos?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16368 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16368/

## Key facts

- Cited by 81 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [ViperGPT: Visual Inference via Python Execution for Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08128/) (2023)
- [VectorNet: Encoding HD Maps and Agent Dynamics from Vectorized Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04259/) (2020)
- [Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11559/) (2022)
- [Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00598/) (2022)
- [COIN: A Large-scale Dataset for Comprehensive Instructional Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02874/) (2019)
- [Assembly101: A Large-Scale Multi-View Video Dataset for Understanding Procedural Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14712/) (2022)
- [The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset: Collection, Challenges and Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00343/) (2020)
- [Anticipative Video Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02036/) (2021)
- [Cross-task weakly supervised learning from instructional videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08225/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models as General Pattern Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04721/) (2023)
- [BEVT: BERT Pretraining of Video Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01529/) (2021)
- [Linearly Mapping from Image to Text Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15162/) (2022)
- [VideoLLM: Modeling Video Sequence with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13292/) (2023)
- [EGO-TOPO: Environment Affordances from Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04583/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 81)

- [VideoLLM-online: Online Video Large Language Model for Streaming Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11816/) (2024)
- [Video Understanding with Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17432/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12605/) (2025)
- [VisuLogic: A Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Reasoning in Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15279/) (2025)
- [Perception, Reason, Think, and Plan: A Survey on Large Multimodal Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04921/) (2025)
- [VideoLLM-MoD: Efficient Video-Language Streaming with Mixture-of-Depths Vision Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16730/) (2024)
- [EgoVideo: Exploring Egocentric Foundation Model and Downstream Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18070/) (2024)
- [Reinforced MLLM: A Survey on RL-Based Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21277/) (2025)
- [Vamos: Versatile Action Models for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13627/) (2023)
- [Visual Large Language Models for Generalized and Specialized Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02765/) (2025)
- [Can't make an Omelette without Breaking some Eggs: Plausible Action Anticipation using Large Video-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20305/) (2024)
- [PALM: Predicting Actions through Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17944/) (2023)
- [VideoLLaMB: Long Streaming Video Understanding with Recurrent Memory Bridges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01071/) (2024)
- [Challenges and Trends in Egocentric Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15275/) (2025)
- [Memory-efficient Streaming VideoLLMs for Real-time Procedural Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13915/) (2025)
- [Video Summarization with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11199/) (2025)
- [Chiron-o1: Igniting Multimodal Large Language Models towards Generalizable Medical Reasoning via Mentor-Intern Collaborative Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16962/) (2025)
- [Why Not Use Your Textbook? Knowledge-Enhanced Procedure Planning of Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02782/) (2024)
- [Propose, Assess, Search: Harnessing LLMs for Goal-Oriented Planning in Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20557/) (2024)
- [Towards Online Multi-Modal Social Interaction Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19851/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning Techniques for Action Anticipation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17257/) (2023)
- [Gaze-VLM:Bridging Gaze and VLMs through Attention Regularization for Egocentric Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21356/) (2025)
- [TI-PREGO: Chain of Thought and In-Context Learning for Online Mistake Detection in PRocedural EGOcentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02570/) (2024)
- [Intention-Guided Cognitive Reasoning for Egocentric Long-Term Action Anticipation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01742/) (2025)
- [Human Action Anticipation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14045/) (2024)
- [Action Anticipation from SoccerNet Football Video Broadcasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12021/) (2025)
- [Technical Report for Ego4D Long-Term Action Anticipation Challenge 2025](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02550/) (2025)
- [How Can Objects Help Video-Language Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07454/) (2025)
- [H-MoRe: Learning Human-centric Motion Representation for Action Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10676/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-boosted Robust Video Activity Anticipation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18648/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Can we better anticipate an actor's future actions (e.g. mix eggs) by knowing what commonly happens after his/her current action (e.g. crack eggs)? What if we also know the longer-term goal of the actor (e.g. making egg fried rice)? The long-term action anticipation (LTA) task aims to predict an actor's future behavior from video observations in the form of verb and noun sequences, and it is crucial for human-machine interaction. We propose to formulate the LTA task from two perspectives: a bottom-up approach that predicts the next actions autoregressively by modeling temporal dynamics; and a top-down approach that infers the goal of the actor and plans the needed procedure to accomplish the goal. We hypothesize that large language models (LLMs), which have been pretrained on procedure text data (e.g. recipes, how-tos), have the potential to help LTA from both perspectives. It can help provide the prior knowledge on the possible next actions, and infer the goal given the observed part of a procedure, respectively. To leverage the LLMs, we propose a two-stage framework, AntGPT. It first recognizes the actions already performed in the observed videos and then asks an LLM to predict the future actions via conditioned generation, or to infer the goal and plan the whole procedure by chain-of-thought prompting. Empirical results on the Ego4D LTA v1 and v2 benchmarks, EPIC-Kitchens-55, as well as EGTEA GAZE+ demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. AntGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on all above benchmarks, and can successfully infer the goal and thus perform goal-conditioned "counterfactual" prediction via qualitative analysis. Code and model will be released at https://brown-palm.github.io/AntGPT