EPFL-Smart-Kitchen: An Ego-Exo Multi-Modal Dataset for Challenging Action and Motion Understanding in Video-Language Models

Abstract

Understanding behavior requires datasets that capture humans while carrying out complex tasks. The kitchen is an excellent environment for assessing human motor and cognitive function, as many complex actions are naturally exhibited in kitchens from chopping to cleaning. Here, we introduce the EPFL-Smart-Kitchen-30 dataset, collected in a noninvasive motion capture platform inside a kitchen environment. Nine static RGB-D cameras, inertial measurement units (IMUs) and one head-mounted HoloLens~2 headset were used to capture 3D hand, body, and eye movements. The EPFL-Smart-Kitchen-30 dataset is a multi-view action dataset with synchronized exocentric, egocentric, depth, IMUs, eye gaze, body and hand kinematics spanning 29.7 hours of 16 subjects cooking four different recipes. Action sequences were densely annotated with 33.78 action segments per minute. Leveraging this multi-modal dataset, we propose four benchmarks to advance behavior understanding and modeling through 1) a vision-language benchmark, 2) a semantic text-to-motion generation benchmark, 3) a multi-modal action recognition benchmark, 4) a pose-based action segmentation benchmark. We expect the EPFL-Smart-Kitchen-30 dataset to pave the way for better methods as well as insights to understand the nature of ecologically-valid human behavior. Code and data are available at https://amathislab.github.io/EPFL-Smart-Kitchen

Cite

Text

Bonnetto et al. "EPFL-Smart-Kitchen: An Ego-Exo Multi-Modal Dataset for Challenging Action and Motion Understanding in Video-Language Models." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025.

Markdown

[Bonnetto et al. "EPFL-Smart-Kitchen: An Ego-Exo Multi-Modal Dataset for Challenging Action and Motion Understanding in Video-Language Models." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025.](https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2025/bonnetto2025neurips-epflsmartkitchen/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{bonnetto2025neurips-epflsmartkitchen,
  title     = {{EPFL-Smart-Kitchen: An Ego-Exo Multi-Modal Dataset for Challenging Action and Motion Understanding in Video-Language Models}},
  author    = {Bonnetto, Andy and Qi, Haozhe and Leong, Franklin and Tashkovska, Matea and Rad, Mahdi and Shokur, Solaiman and Hummel, Friedhelm and Micera, Silvestro and Pollefeys, Marc and Mathis, Alexander},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year      = {2025},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2025/bonnetto2025neurips-epflsmartkitchen/}
}