Are We Measuring Anticipation? Auditing Privileged Information in Procedural Video Evaluation

arXiv:2610.03826v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmark scores license claims about the capabilities being evaluated. We audit the inference licensed by an evaluation protocol, rather than the predictive model alone. Using procedural action anticipation as a controlled case study, we study a broader evaluation-validity failure mode: a protocol can remain temporally causal and free of classical target leakage while still supplying a privileged intermediate representation. The failure is not merely optimistic accuracy, but a mismatch between the capability claimed and the construct actually measured. On Breakfast, matched recognizer-history and GT-history regimes score 30.3% and 62.3% (Delta_PH(R_BA) = +32.0, 95% Student-t interval [+24.1, +39.8]). A fixed-checkpoint 2 x 2 intervention isolates a +14.6-point test-time oracle contrast; a matched no-video provenance probe yields a +26.8-point gap; and a boundary-independent query/history control retains a +19.4-point gap. We refer to this discrepancy as a privileged-information gap, defined relative to a specified non-oracle recovery pipeline, and propose a reusable four-condition audit. Across five evaluation settings the gap is heterogeneous; a standard 50 Salads long-term-anticipation re-implementation provides cautious support beyond the audit-specific next-action construction.

Source: arXiv cs.CV | 2026-10-06

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