ProfVLM: A lightweight video-language model for multi-view proficiency estimation
About
Most existing approaches formulate action quality assessment and skill proficiency estimation as discriminative prediction tasks, typically producing discrete labels or scores without explicitly modeling the reasoning process underlying the assessment. We instead reformulate the problem as generative vision-language modeling, introducing ProfVLM, a parameter-efficient vision-language model that jointly predicts proficiency levels and generates expert-like natural language feedback from multi-view videos. ProfVLM leverages conditional language generation to provide actionable insights along with quantitative evaluation scores. Central to our method is an AttentiveGatedProjector that dynamically fuses and projects multi-view egocentric and exocentric features from a frozen TimeSformer backbone into a language model fine-tuned for feedback generation. Trained on EgoExo4D with expert commentaries, ProfVLM surpasses state-of-the-art methods while using up to 20x fewer parameters and reducing training time by up to 60% compared to existing classification-based methods. By providing natural language critiques aligned with performance levels, this work shows that generative vision-language modeling offers a powerful and efficient paradigm shift for interpretable action quality assessment.