# BARISTA: A Multi-Task Egocentric Benchmark for Compositional Visual Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12074 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12074/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2026.

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

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09126/) (2023)
- [LongVideoBench: A Benchmark for Long-context Interleaved Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15754/) (2024)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [ActivityNet-QA: A Dataset for Understanding Complex Web Videos via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02467/) (2019)
- [BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12390/) (2024)
- [Ferret: Refer and Ground Anything Anywhere at Any Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07704/) (2023)
- [Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18259/) (2023)
- [HOI4D: A 4D Egocentric Dataset for Category-Level Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01577/) (2022)
- [COIN: A Large-scale Dataset for Comprehensive Instructional Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02874/) (2019)
- [Set-of-Mark Prompting Unleashes Extraordinary Visual Grounding in GPT-4V](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11441/) (2023)
- [Assembly101: A Large-Scale Multi-View Video Dataset for Understanding Procedural Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14712/) (2022)
- [Action Genome: Actions as Composition of Spatio-temporal Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06992/) (2019)
- [HoloAssist: an Egocentric Human Interaction Dataset for Interactive AI Assistants in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17024/) (2023)
- [Physically Grounded Vision-Language Models for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02561/) (2023)
- [EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR Benchmark: VIdeo Segmentations and Object Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13064/) (2022)
- [AGQA: A Benchmark for Compositional Spatio-Temporal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16002/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scene understanding is central to general physical intelligence, and video is a primary modality for capturing both state and temporal dynamics of a scene. Yet understanding physical processes remains difficult, as models must combine object localization, hand-object interactions, relational parsing, temporal reasoning, and step-level procedural inference. Existing benchmarks usually evaluate these capabilities separately, limiting diagnosis of why models fail on procedural tasks. We introduce BARISTA, a densely annotated egocentric dataset and benchmark of 185 real-world coffee-preparation videos covering fully automatic, portafilter-based, and capsule-based workflows. BARISTA provides verified per-frame scene graphs linking persistent object identities to masks, tracks, boxes, attributes, typed relations, hand-object interactions, activities, and process steps. From these graphs, we derive zero-shot language-based tasks spanning phrase grounding, hand-object interaction recognition, referring, activity recognition, relation extraction, and temporal visual question answering. Experiments reveal strong variation across task families and no consistently dominant model family, positioning BARISTA as a challenging diagnostic benchmark for procedural video understanding. Code and dataset available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ramblr/BARISTA.