# Graph it first! Enabling Reasoning on Long-form Egocentric Videos through Scene Graphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25842 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25842/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 40 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09126/) (2023)
- [Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14045/) (2023)
- [VideoLLaMA 3: Frontier Multimodal Foundation Models for Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13106/) (2025)
- [Scene Graph Generation by Iterative Message Passing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02426/) (2017)
- [InternLM-XComposer2: Mastering Free-form Text-Image Composition and Comprehension in Vision-Language Large Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16420/) (2024)
- [3D Scene Graph: A Structure for Unified Semantics, 3D Space, and Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02527/) (2019)
- [Action Genome: Actions as Composition of Spatio-temporal Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06992/) (2019)
- [EgoTaskQA: Understanding Human Tasks in Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03929/) (2022)
- [EGO-TOPO: Environment Affordances from Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04583/) (2020)
- [HD-EPIC: A Highly-Detailed Egocentric Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04144/) (2025)
- [PerceptionLM: Open-Access Data and Models for Detailed Visual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13180/) (2025)
- [EgoLife: Towards Egocentric Life Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03803/) (2025)
- [Words or Vision: Do Vision-Language Models Have Blind Faith in Text?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02199/) (2025)
- [An Outlook into the Future of Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07123/) (2023)
- [Home Action Genome: Cooperative Compositional Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05226/) (2021)
- [Action Scene Graphs for Long-Form Understanding of Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03391/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [G3Ego: Gaze-Guided Graphs for Egocentric Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20157/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) face significant challenges in processing long video sequences due to strict input token limitations. As a result, current video understanding approaches, especially in egocentric settings characterized by complex dynamics, frequent state changes, and moving cameras, are forced to massively subsample frames. This leads to severe loss of temporal and contextual information, constraining their ability to perform fine-grained video reasoning. In this work, we introduce a framework for egocentric video question answering (VQA) that overcomes these input constraints through Egocentric Scene Graphs (EgoSGs), i.e., temporally grounded, structured representations that capture objects, attributes, spatial relations, and interactions over time. By representing videos as compact, text-based scene graphs, our method preserves the essential visual and temporal information of the original video in a symbolic form that drastically reduces input length while maintaining semantic richness. Crucially, this enables MLLMs to reason efficiently over entire video sequences within their token budget. On HD-EPIC VQA, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming strong video-based baselines on multiple models and suggesting that structured, temporally grounded representations like EgoSGs can bridge long-form egocentric video understanding and the context limitations of today's MLLMs.