WearVQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Wearables in Egocentric Authentic Real-world scenarios
Eun Chang, Zhuangqun Huang, Yiwei Liao, Sagar Bhavsar, Amogh Param, Tammy Stark, Adel Ahmadyan, Xiao Yang, Jiaqi Wang, Ahsan Abdullah, Giang Nguyen, Akil Iyer, David Hall, Elissa Li, Nicolas Scheffer, Ahmed Kirmani, Babak Damavandi, Rakesh Wanga, Anuj Kumar, Rohit Patel, Seungwhan Moon, Xin Luna Dong
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 usingonly the visual input and common senses. WearVQA is paired with a rigorous LLM-as-a-judge evaluationframework with 96% labeling accuracy. Open-source and proprietary multi-modal LLMs achieved a QAaccuracy 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.