WearVQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Wearables in Egocentric Authentic Real-world scenarios

Eun Chang, Zhuangqun Huang, Yiwei Liao, Sagar Ravi Bhavsar, Amogh Param, Tammy Stark, Adel Ahmadyan, Xiao Yang, Jiaqi Wang, Ahsan Abdullah, Giang Nguyen, Akil Iyer, David Patrick hall, Elissa Li, Nicolas SCHEFFER, Ahmed Kirmani, Babak Damavandi, Rakesh Wanga, Anuj Kumar, Rohit Patel, Seungwhan Moon, Xin Luna Dong

Abstract

We introduce WearVQA, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the visual questionanswering (VQA) capabilities of multi-modal AI assistant on wearable devices like smart glasses. Unlikeprior benchmarks that focus on high-quality, third-person imagery, WearVQA reflects the unique chal-lenges of ego-centric interaction—where visual inputs may be occluded, poorly lit, unzoomed, or blurry, and questions are grounded in realistic wearable use cases.

The benchmark comprises 2,500 carefullycurated image-question-answer triplets, spanning 7 diverse image domains including both text-centricand general scenes, 10 cognitive task types ranging from basic recognition to various forms of reasoning, and 6 common wearables-specific image quality issues. All questions are designed to be answerable using only the visual input and common senses.

WearVQA is paired with a rigorous LLM-as-a-judge evaluation framework with 96% labeling accuracy. Open-source and proprietary multi-modal LLMs achieved a QA accuracy as low as 24–52% on WearVQA, with substantial drops on lower-quality images and reasoning-heavy tasks. These observations position WearVQA as a comprehensive and challenging benchmark forguiding technicial advancement towards robust, real-world multi-modal wearables AI systems.