# ProbRes: Probabilistic Jump Diffusion for Open-World Egocentric Activity Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03948 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03948/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18259/) (2023)
- [Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06888/) (2017)
- [Supervision Exists Everywhere: A Data Efficient Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05208/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14940/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Learning Video Representations from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04501/) (2022)
- [EgoVLPv2: Egocentric Video-Language Pre-training with Fusion in the Backbone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05463/) (2023)
- [EgoTaskQA: Understanding Human Tasks in Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03929/) (2022)
- [Actor and Observer: Joint Modeling of First and Third-Person Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09627/) (2018)
- [My View is the Best View: Procedure Learning from Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10883/) (2022)
- [Compositional Entailment Learning for Hyperbolic Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06912/) (2024)
- [HierVL: Learning Hierarchical Video-Language Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02311/) (2023)
- [LSTA: Long Short-Term Attention for Egocentric Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10698/) (2018)
- [Going Deeper into First-Person Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.03688/) (2016)
- [Learning Fine-grained View-Invariant Representations from Unpaired Ego-Exo Videos via Temporal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05526/) (2023)
- [MM-Ego: Towards Building Egocentric Multimodal LLMs for Video QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07177/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Dense360: Dense Understanding from Omnidirectional Panoramas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14471/) (2025)
- [Hallucinate, Ground, Repeat: A Framework for Generalized Visual Relationship Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05651/) (2025)
- [SAVA-X: Ego-to-Exo Imitation Error Detection via Scene-Adaptive View Alignment and Bidirectional Cross View Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12764/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-world egocentric activity recognition poses a fundamental challenge due to its unconstrained nature, requiring models to infer unseen activities from an expansive, partially observed search space. We introduce ProbRes, a Probabilistic Residual search framework based on jump-diffusion that efficiently navigates this space by balancing prior-guided exploration with likelihood-driven exploitation. Our approach integrates structured commonsense priors to construct a semantically coherent search space, adaptively refines predictions using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and employs a stochastic search mechanism to locate high-likelihood activity labels while minimizing exhaustive enumeration efficiently. We systematically evaluate ProbRes across multiple openness levels (L0-L3), demonstrating its adaptability to increasing search space complexity. In addition to achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets (GTEA Gaze, GTEA Gaze+, EPIC-Kitchens, and Charades-Ego), we establish a clear taxonomy for open-world recognition, delineating the challenges and methodological advancements necessary for egocentric activity understanding. Our results highlight the importance of structured search strategies, paving the way for scalable and efficient open-world activity recognition.