# Transparent and Coherent Procedural Mistake Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11927 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11927/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 88 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14992/) (2023)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models through Visual Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16922/) (2023)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [When and why vision-language models behave like bags-of-words, and what to do about it?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01936/) (2022)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Otter: A Multi-Modal Model with In-Context Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03726/) (2023)
- [Visual Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08669/) (2016)
- [Agent Q: Advanced Reasoning and Learning for Autonomous AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07199/) (2024)
- [HoloAssist: an Egocentric Human Interaction Dataset for Interactive AI Assistants in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17024/) (2023)
- [AlphaMath Almost Zero: Process Supervision without Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03553/) (2024)
- [Accessing GPT-4 level Mathematical Olympiad Solutions via Monte Carlo Tree Self-refine with LLaMa-3 8B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07394/) (2024)
- [MathCoder: Seamless Code Integration in LLMs for Enhanced Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03731/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Models as Success Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07280/) (2023)
- [Mutual Reasoning Makes Smaller LLMs Stronger Problem-Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06195/) (2024)
- [Dialogue Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00671/) (2018)
- [Toward Self-Improvement of LLMs via Imagination, Searching, and Criticizing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12253/) (2024)
- [GuessWhat?! Visual object discovery through multi-modal dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08481/) (2016)
- [Probing Image-Language Transformers for Verb Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09141/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Building Egocentric Procedural AI Assistant: Methods, Benchmarks, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13261/) (2025)
- [How to Correctly Make Mistakes: A Framework for Constructing and Benchmarking Mistake Aware Egocentric Procedural Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15134/) (2026)
- [Mistake Attribution: Fine-Grained Mistake Understanding in Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20525/) (2025)
- [It Takes One to Bias Them All: Breaking Bad with One-Shot GRPO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10931/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Procedural mistake detection (PMD) is a challenging problem of classifying whether a human user (observed through egocentric video) has successfully executed a task (specified by a procedural text). Despite significant recent efforts, machine performance in the wild remains nonviable, and the reasoning processes underlying this performance are opaque. As such, we extend PMD to require generating visual self-dialog rationales to inform decisions. Given the impressive, mature image understanding capabilities observed in recent vision-and-language models (VLMs), we curate a suitable benchmark dataset for PMD based on individual frames. As our reformulation enables unprecedented transparency, we leverage a natural language inference (NLI) model to formulate two automated metrics for the coherence of generated rationales. We establish baselines for this reframed task, showing that VLMs struggle off-the-shelf, but with some trade-offs, their accuracy, coherence, and efficiency can be improved by incorporating these metrics into common inference and fine-tuning methods. Lastly, our multi-faceted metrics visualize common outcomes, highlighting areas for further improvement.
