We introduce Mistake Attribution (MATT), a new task for fine-grained understanding of human mistakes in egocentric videos. While prior work detects whether a mistake occurs, MATT attributes the mistake to what part of the instruction is violated (semantic role), when in the video the deviation becomes irreversible (the Point-of-No-Return, PNR), and where the mistake appears in the PNR frame. We develop MisEngine, a data engine that automatically constructs mistake samples from existing datasets with attribution-rich annotations. Applied to large egocentric corpora, MisEngine yields EPIC-KITCHENS-M and Ego4D-M -- two datasets up to two orders of magnitude larger than prior mistake datasets. We then present MisFormer, a unified attention-based model for mistake attribution across semantic, temporal, and spatial dimensions, trained with MisEngine supervision. A human study demonstrates the ecological validity of our MisEngine-constructed mistake samples, confirming that EPIC-KITCHENS-M and Ego4D-M can serve as reliable benchmarks for mistake understanding. Experiments on both our datasets and prior benchmarks show that MisFormer, as a single unified model, outperforms task-specific SO
We investigate the learning task of language generation in the limit, but shift focus from the traditional time-of-last-mistake metric of a generator's success to a new notion of "mistake-bounded generation." While existing results for language generation in the limit focus on guaranteeing eventual consistency, they are blind to the cumulative error incurred during the learning process. We address this by shifting the goal to minimizing the total number of invalid elements output by a generation algorithm. We establish a formal reduction to the Learning from Correct Demonstrations framework of Joshi et al. (2025), enabling a general recipe for deriving mistake bounds via weighted update rules. For finite classes, we provide an algorithm that simultaneously achieves an optimal last-mistake time of $\mathsf{Cdim}(L)$ and a mistake bound of $\lfloor \log_2 |L| \rfloor$, whereas for the non-uniform setting of countably infinite streams of languages, we prove a fundamental trade-off: achieving logarithmic mistakes $O(\log i)$ necessarily precludes convergence guarantees established in prior work. Finally, we show that our framework can be extended to accommodate noisy adversaries and gu
Mistake action detection is crucial for developing intelligent archives that detect workers' errors and provide feedback. Existing studies have focused on visually apparent mistakes in free-style activities, resulting in video-only approaches to mistake detection. However, in text-following activities, models cannot determine the correctness of some actions without referring to the texts. Additionally, current mistake datasets rarely use procedural texts for video recording except for cooking. To fill these gaps, this paper proposes the EgoOops dataset, where egocentric videos record erroneous activities when following procedural texts across diverse domains. It features three types of annotations: video-text alignment, mistake labels, and descriptions for mistakes. We also propose a mistake detection approach, combining video-text alignment and mistake label classification to leverage the texts. Our experimental results show that incorporating procedural texts is essential for mistake detection. Data is available through https://y-haneji.github.io/EgoOops-project-page/.
Procedural mistake detection is important for quality control and user assistance across many disciplines. Recent work in this field has achieved significant gains by using the reasoning capabilities of Video-Language Models (VLMs) as components within multi-stage pipelines, which consist of separate modules for supervised temporal action segmentation, error detection, and explainability. Consequently, they remain dependent on tailored training datasets and require task-specific training, limiting their wider applicability. To remedy this, we introduce zero-shot procedural mistake detection and propose a unified Zero-shot Procedural Mistake detection (ZeProM) framework that jointly solves procedural mistake detection and temporal action segmentation with a single pre-trained VLM. By evaluating our framework on two canonical mistake detection benchmarks, EgoPER and CaptainCook4D, we find that ZeProM can perform these tasks successfully, while approaching, or even outperforming, the performance of fully supervised methods. For instance, we achieve a 4.4 point improvement in EDA and a 2.0 point improvement in F1@.5 on average over all five EgoPER tasks compared to the strongest superv
Synaptic plasticity is metabolically expensive, yet animals continuously update their internal models without exhausting energy reserves. However, when artificial neural networks are trained, the network parameters are typically updated on every sample that is presented, even if the sample was classified correctly. Inspired by the human negativity bias and error-related negativity, we propose 'memorized mistake-gated learning' -- a biologically plausible plasticity rule where synaptic updates are strictly gated by current and past classification errors. This reduces the number of updates the network needs to make by $50\%\sim80\%$. Mistake gating is particularly well suited in two cases: 1) For incremental learning where new knowledge is acquired on a background of pre-existing knowledge, 2) For online learning scenarios when data needs to be stored for later replay, as mistake-gating reduces storage buffer requirements. The algorithm can be implemented in a few lines of code, adds no hyper-parameters, and comes at negligible computational overhead. Learning on mistakes is an energy efficient and biologically relevant modification to commonly used learning rules that is well suited
Reliable procedural monitoring in video requires exposure to naturally occurring human errors and the recoveries that follow. In egocentric recordings, mistakes are often partially occluded by hands and revealed through subtle object state changes, while existing procedural datasets provide limited and inconsistent mistake and correction traces. We present PIE-V (Psychologically Inspired Error injection for Videos), a framework for constructing and benchmarking mistake-aware egocentric procedural videos by augmenting clean keystep procedures with controlled, human-plausible deviations. PIE-V combines a psychology-informed error planner conditioned on procedure phase and semantic step load, a correction planner that models recovery behavior, an LLM writer that performs cascade-consistent rewrites, and an LLM judge that validates procedural coherence and repairs failures. For video segment edits, PIE-V synthesizes replacement clips with text-guided video generation and stitches them into the episode to preserve visual plausibility. Applied to 17 tasks and 50 Ego-Exo4D scenarios, PIE-V injects 102 mistakes and generates 27 recovery corrections. For benchmarking, we introduce a unified
The advancement of machine learning in audio analysis has opened new possibilities for technology-enhanced music education. This paper introduces a framework for automatic singing mistake detection in the context of music pedagogy, supported by a newly curated dataset. The dataset comprises synchronized teacher learner vocal recordings, with annotations marking different types of mistakes made by learners. Using this dataset, we develop different deep learning models for mistake detection and benchmark them. To compare the efficacy of mistake detection systems, a new evaluation methodology is proposed. Experiments indicate that the proposed learning-based methods are superior to rule-based methods. A systematic study of errors and a cross-teacher study reveal insights into music pedagogy that can be utilised for various music applications. This work sets out new directions of research in music pedagogy. The codes and dataset are publicly available.
We introduce the task of early mistake detection in video, where the goal is to determine whether a keystep in a procedural activity is performed correctly while observing as little of the streaming video as possible. To tackle this problem, we propose a method comprising a mistake detector and a reinforcement learning policy. At each timestep, the detector processes recently observed frames to estimate the keystep's correctness while anticipating future visual features, enabling reliable early mistake estimates. Meanwhile, the policy aggregates the detector outputs and visual observations over time and adaptively decides when to exit (i.e., stop processing incoming frames) while producing the final prediction. Using diverse real-world procedural video datasets, we demonstrate that our MistExit model achieves superior mistake detection accuracy while reducing the fraction of video observed compared to state-of-the-art models. Project: https://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/mist_exit.
We present Team BD's submission to the BEA 2025 Shared Task on Pedagogical Ability Assessment of AI-powered Tutors, under Track 1 (Mistake Identification) and Track 2 (Mistake Location). Both tracks involve three-class classification of tutor responses in educational dialogues - determining if a tutor correctly recognizes a student's mistake (Track 1) and whether the tutor pinpoints the mistake's location (Track 2). Our system is built on MPNet, a Transformer-based language model that combines BERT and XLNet's pre-training advantages. We fine-tuned MPNet on the task data using a class-weighted cross-entropy loss to handle class imbalance, and leveraged grouped cross-validation (10 folds) to maximize the use of limited data while avoiding dialogue overlap between training and validation. We then performed a hard-voting ensemble of the best models from each fold, which improves robustness and generalization by combining multiple classifiers. Our approach achieved strong results on both tracks, with exact-match macro-F1 scores of approximately 0.7110 for Mistake Identification and 0.5543 for Mistake Location on the official test set. We include comprehensive analysis of our system's p
Evaluating the pedagogical quality of AI tutors remains challenging: standard NLG metrics do not determine whether responses identify mistakes, scaffold reasoning, or avoid revealing the answers. For the task of mistake remediation, we derive a hierarchy of pedagogical aspects from human pairwise preferences on MRBench, and synthesize minimally contrastive response pairs that differ along key aspects (e.g., mistake identification and location, targetedness, scaffolding, actionability, clarity, and coherence). We develop and release Bradley-Terry preference models trained on weighted-sum rankings that we automatically create from MRBench, synthetic pairs, and data combinations. Using only synthetic data, our best model reaches 0.69 pairwise accuracy on a human preference test, and combining weighted-sum data with targeted synthetic groups improves accuracy to 0.74, outperforming larger general-purpose reward models while using only a 0.5B-parameter backbone.
As robotic systems execute increasingly difficult task sequences, so does the number of ways in which they can fail. Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) frameworks typically focus on singular, low-level kinematic or action failures, struggling to identify more complex temporal or spatial task violations, because they do not necessarily manifest as low-level execution errors. To address this problem, the main contribution of this paper is a new VAD-inspired architecture, TIMID, which is able to detect robot time-dependent mistakes when executing high-level tasks. Our architecture receives as inputs a video and prompts of the task and the potential mistake, and returns a frame-level prediction in the video of whether the mistake is present or not. By adopting a VAD formulation, the model can be trained with weak supervision, requiring only a single label per video. Additionally, to alleviate the problem of data scarcity of incorrect executions, we introduce a multi-robot simulation dataset with controlled temporal errors and real executions for zero-shot sim-to-real evaluation. Our experiments demonstrate that out-of-the-box VLMs lack the explicit temporal reasoning required for this task,
Agricultural robots are serving as powerful assistants across a wide range of agricultural tasks, nevertheless, still heavily relying on manual operations or railway systems for movement. The AgriVLN method and the A2A benchmark pioneeringly extended Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) to the agricultural domain, enabling a robot to navigate to a target position following a natural language instruction. However, almost all the prior methods adopt an ideal assumption that the given instructions themselves are correct, which does not align with the realistic scenarios, because anybody may say an instruction with mistakes. To bridge this gap, we propose the A2A-MI benchmark, in which we build a semi-automatic data annotator to insert three mistake classifications into each original instruction in a more diversified and efficient way. We test several state-of-the-art agricultural VLN agents on it and observe a sufficient drop with -57% on SR and -9% on NE, from which we suggest that an agricultural VLN agent tends to assume that the given instruction is correct, so does not have the awareness to doubt it when the scenes it sees do not align with the instruction it receives. To build t
iCloud Drive presents a filesystem interface but implements cloud synchronization semantics that diverge from POSIX in fundamental ways. This divergence is not an implementation bug; it is a Category Mistake -- the same one that pervades distributed computing wherever Forward-In-Time-Only (FITO) assumptions are embedded into protocol design. Parker et al. showed in 1983 that network partitioning destroys mutual consistency; iCloud adds a user interface that conceals this impossibility behind a facade of seamlessness. This document presents a unified analysis of why iCloud fails when composed with Time Machine, git, automated toolchains, and general-purpose developer workflows, supported by direct evidence including documented corruption events and a case study involving 366 GB of divergent state accumulated through normal use. We show that the failures arise from five interlocking incompatibilities rooted in a single structural error: the projection of a distributed causal graph onto a linear temporal chain. We then show how the same Category Mistake, when it occurs in network fabrics as link flapping, destroys topology knowledge through epistemic collapse. Finally, we argue that O
This supplement documents the intellectual trajectory that led to the Category Mistake framework and the Forward-In-Time-Only (FITO) analysis presented in our recent arXiv papers. The ideas crystallized over fifteen years of research, conversation, and engineering practice -- beginning with a 2014 Stanford EE380 lecture on the physics of time in computing, sharpened through a 2016 email exchange with Leslie Lamport following a Papers We Love presentation of his seminal 1978 paper, and matured through the development of Open Atomic Ethernet (OAE). This document traces the concept development from its origins in the physics of entanglement and background-free time, through the recognition that Lamport's "happened-before" relation embeds a category mistake, to the practical engineering consequences documented in "Why iCloud Fails" and "What Distributed Computing Got Wrong." It is intended as archival supplementary material for future arXiv submission.
Promptly identifying procedural errors from egocentric videos in an online setting is highly challenging and valuable for detecting mistakes as soon as they happen. This capability has a wide range of applications across various fields, such as manufacturing and healthcare. The nature of procedural mistakes is open-set since novel types of failures might occur, which calls for one-class classifiers trained on correctly executed procedures. However, no technique can currently detect open-set procedural mistakes online. We propose PREGO, the first online one-class classification model for mistake detection in PRocedural EGOcentric videos. PREGO is based on an online action recognition component to model the current action, and a symbolic reasoning module to predict the next actions. Mistake detection is performed by comparing the recognized current action with the expected future one. We evaluate PREGO on two procedural egocentric video datasets, Assembly101 and Epic-tent, which we adapt for online benchmarking of procedural mistake detection to establish suitable benchmarks, thus defining the Assembly101-O and Epic-tent-O datasets, respectively.
Mistake analysis in procedural activities is a critical area of research with applications spanning industrial automation, physical rehabilitation, education and human-robot collaboration. This paper reviews vision-based methods for detecting and predicting mistakes in structured tasks, focusing on procedural and executional errors. By leveraging advancements in computer vision, including action recognition, anticipation and activity understanding, vision-based systems can identify deviations in task execution, such as incorrect sequencing, use of improper techniques, or timing errors. We explore the challenges posed by intra-class variability, viewpoint differences and compositional activity structures, which complicate mistake detection. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive overview of existing datasets, evaluation metrics and state-of-the-art methods, categorizing approaches based on their use of procedural structure, supervision levels and learning strategies. Open challenges, such as distinguishing permissible variations from true mistakes and modeling error propagation are discussed alongside future directions, including neuro-symbolic reasoning and counterfactual state m
This article discusses incorrect statements appearing in textbooks on quantum field theory (QFT); some of these mistakes also appear in the research literature. The focus is not on errors made by an individual author, but on conceptual muddledness that is widespread in introductory textbooks. We start from a bare-bones summary of QFT, meant to establish the notation. We then turn to our six paradigmatic themes, in each case quoting a specific example of the textbook mistake, a summary of material that is known to experts but is frequently mishandled in introductory works, pointers to authoritative references where the relevant concept is handled properly, as well as a concise correction that rectifies any issues. The goal of this work is to warn readers of the existence of several pitfalls and thereby stop these errors from further propagating in the literature on QFT.
We address the challenge of unsupervised mistake detection in egocentric video of skilled human activities through the analysis of gaze signals. While traditional methods rely on manually labeled mistakes, our approach does not require mistake annotations, hence overcoming the need of domain-specific labeled data. Based on the observation that eye movements closely follow object manipulation activities, we assess to what extent eye-gaze signals can support mistake detection, proposing to identify deviations in attention patterns measured through a gaze tracker with respect to those estimated by a gaze prediction model. Since predicting gaze in video is characterized by high uncertainty, we propose a novel gaze completion task, where eye fixations are predicted from visual observations and partial gaze trajectories, and contribute a novel gaze completion approach which explicitly models correlations between gaze information and local visual tokens. Inconsistencies between predicted and observed gaze trajectories act as an indicator to identify mistakes. Experiments highlight the effectiveness of the proposed approach in different settings, with relative gains up to +14%, +11%, and +
Self-correction is emerging as a promising approach to mitigate the issue of hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs). To facilitate effective self-correction, recent research has proposed mistake detection as its initial step. However, current literature suggests that LLMs often struggle with reliably identifying reasoning mistakes when using simplistic prompting strategies. To address this challenge, we introduce a unique prompting strategy, termed the Pedagogical Chain-of-Thought (PedCoT), which is specifically designed to guide the identification of reasoning mistakes, particularly mathematical reasoning mistakes. PedCoT consists of pedagogical principles for prompts (PPP) design, two-stage interaction process (TIP) and grounded PedCoT prompts, all inspired by the educational theory of the Bloom Cognitive Model (BCM). We evaluate our approach on two public datasets featuring math problems of varying difficulty levels. The experiments demonstrate that our zero-shot prompting strategy significantly outperforms strong baselines. The proposed method can achieve the goal of reliable mathematical mistake identification and provide a foundation for automatic math answer grading.
Large language models (LLMs) recently exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities on solving math problems. To further improve their reasoning capabilities, this work explores whether LLMs can LEarn from MistAkes (LEMA), akin to the human learning process. Consider a human student who failed to solve a math problem, he will learn from what mistake he has made and how to correct it. Mimicking this error-driven learning process, LEMA incorporates mistake-correction data pairs during fine-tuning LLMs. Specifically, we first collect inaccurate reasoning paths from various LLMs, and then employ GPT-4 as a ''corrector'' to identify the mistake step, explain the reason for the mistake, correct the mistake and generate the final answer. In addition, we apply a correction-centric evolution strategy that effectively expands the question set for generating correction data. Experiments across various LLMs and reasoning tasks show that LEMA effectively improves CoT-alone fine-tuning. Our further ablations shed light on the non-homogeneous effectiveness between CoT data and correction data. These results suggest a significant potential for LLMs to improve through learning from their mistakes. Ou