# S-EMBER: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Streaming Egocentric Memory Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02689 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02689/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [OpenAI GPT-5 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03267/) (2025)
- [EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09126/) (2023)
- [TALL: Temporal Activity Localization via Language Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02101/) (2017)
- [LVBench: An Extreme Long Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08035/) (2024)
- [Video-MMMU: Evaluating Knowledge Acquisition from Multi-Discipline Professional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13826/) (2025)
- [Flash-VStream: Memory-Based Real-Time Understanding for Long Video Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08085/) (2024)
- [OVO-Bench: How Far is Your Video-LLMs from Real-World Online Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05510/) (2025)
- [Can I Trust Your Answer? Visually Grounded Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01327/) (2023)
- [CinePile: A Long Video Question Answering Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08813/) (2024)
- [EgoLife: Towards Egocentric Life Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03803/) (2025)
- [SVBench: A Benchmark with Temporal Multi-Turn Dialogues for Streaming Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10810/) (2025)
- [Omnia de EgoTempo: Benchmarking Temporal Understanding of Multi-Modal LLMs in Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13646/) (2025)
- [AMEGO: Active Memory from long EGOcentric videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10917/) (2024)
- [X-LeBench: A Benchmark for Extremely Long Egocentric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06835/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [TRACE: Temporal Audit and Condition-aware Evaluation of Streaming Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30670/) (2026)
- [EgoProbe: Benchmarking Long-Range and Exact Memory in Streaming Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17128/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As wearable devices enable continuous first-person recording, AI assistants must reason across long time horizons to recall past experiences-a capability known as episodic memory. Current benchmarks often rely on offline evaluation with access to entire video files, failing to simulate the streaming reality of wearable intelligence. We introduce S-EMBER (Streaming Egocentric Memory Benchmark for Episodic Retrieval), a large-scale benchmark comprising 3,141 videos totaling 388 hours of organic activity captured via Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. S-EMBER formalizes grounded streaming episodic retrieval, a paradigm shift from global offline search to causal, active recall triggered by visual events in a continuous stream. We provide 9,448 QA pairs requiring manual visual proof through precise temporal localization and supporting flexible response lengths to simulate natural human-AI interaction. Our extensive benchmarking of frontier models reveals a grounded recall gap: models answer and localize with moderate competence in isolation, yet fall furthest short of human performance when both must hold for the same query, the strongest reaching less than half the human rate. S-EMBER establishes a hardware-authentic foundation for developing grounded, reliable episodic memory in the next generation of wearable AI agents.