EgoAVU: Egocentric Audio-Visual Understanding

Understanding egocentric videos plays a vital role for embodied intelligence. Recent multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) can accept both visual and audio inputs. However, due to the challenge of obtaining text labels with coherent joint-modality information, whether MLLMs can jointly understand both modalities in egocentric videos remains under-explored. To address this problem, we introduce EgoAVU, a scalable data engine to automatically generate egocentric audio-visual narrations, questions and answers. EgoAVU enriches human narrations with multimodal context and generates audiovisual narrations through cross-modal correlation modeling. Token-based video filtering and modular, graph based curation ensure both the data diversity and quality. Leveraging EgoAVU, we construct EgoAVU-Instruct -a large scale training dataset of 3M samples, and EgoAVU-Bench -a manually verified evaluation split covering diverse tasks. EgoAVU-Bench clearly reveals the limitation of existing MLLMs: they bias heavily towards visual signals, often neglecting audio cues or failing to correspond audio with the visual source. Finetuning MLLMs on EgoAVU-Instruct effectively solves this issue, enabling up to 113% performance improvement on EgoAVU-Bench. Such benefit can also transfer to other benchmarks such as EgoTempo and EgoIllusion, achieving up to 28% relative performance gain. Code will be released to the community.