G3Ego: Gaze-Guided Graphs for Egocentric Action Understanding

Egocentric action understanding is often addressed using large video models pretrained on extensive exocentric datasets. However, many first-person actions depend on a small number of hand-object interactions involving only a few relevant entities. We propose G3Ego, a graph-based framework for egocentric action understanding that uses gaze as a structural cue to identify action-relevant entities in the scene. From sparsely sampled frames, G3Ego constructs action scene graphs from vision-language descriptions, grounded objects, and hand cues, and then prunes irrelevant entities using the camera wearer's gaze. The resulting graph embeddings are temporally aggregated for action recognition and anticipation. Unlike prior work that uses gaze primarily as an auxiliary modality or attention signal, G3Ego incorporates gaze directly into graph construction, producing efficient and interpretable representations focused on action-relevant interactions. Experiments on EGTEA Gaze+ and MECCANO show that G3Ego achieves competitive performance compared with video-based approaches and consistently improves Macro-F1 under class-imbalanced evaluation, while avoiding reliance on computationally expensive video pretraining. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of gaze-guided graph representations for egocentric action understanding.