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Aug 12

CurveStream: Boosting Streaming Video Understanding in MLLMs via Curvature-Aware Hierarchical Visual Memory Management

Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved significant success in offline video understanding, yet their application to streaming videos is severely limited by the linear explosion of visual tokens, which often leads to Out-of-Memory (OOM) errors or catastrophic forgetting. Existing visual retention and memory management methods typically rely on uniform sampling, low-level physical metrics, or passive cache eviction. However, these strategies often lack intrinsic semantic awareness, potentially disrupting contextual coherence and blurring transient yet critical semantic transitions. To address these limitations, we propose CurveStream, a training-free, curvature-aware hierarchical visual memory management framework. Our approach is motivated by the key observation that high-curvature regions along continuous feature trajectories closely align with critical global semantic transitions. Based on this geometric insight, CurveStream evaluates real-time semantic intensity via a Curvature Score and integrates an online K-Sigma dynamic threshold to adaptively route frames into clear and fuzzy memory states under a strict token budget. Evaluations across diverse temporal scales confirm that this lightweight framework, CurveStream, consistently yields absolute performance gains of over 10% (e.g., 10.69% on StreamingBench and 13.58% on OVOBench) over respective baselines, establishing new state-of-the-art results for streaming video perception.The code will be released at https://github.com/streamingvideos/CurveStream.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 19 2

VideoChat3: Fully Open Video MLLM for Efficient and Generalist Video Understanding

Recent advances in video understanding have spanned motion, long video, and streaming interaction, driving this field toward real-world applications. Despite this progress, current open-source models remain limited in several ways. They often struggle to generalize across diverse video types, making them effective only in specific domains. High computational demands further restrict their efficiency and scalability. Moreover, most models are only partially open, with key components such as training code, strategy, or datasets unavailable, which hinders reproducibility and slows community-driven development. To address these issues, we introduce VideoChat3, a fully open, efficient, and generalist video-centric MLLM. VideoChat3 advances video understanding through two complementary designs. For efficiency, we introduce Inflated 3D Vision Transformer (I3D-ViT) and Adaptive Frame Resolution for Streaming Video Perception, which enables efficient spatiotemporal representation and reduces the cost of processing video inputs during training and inference. For effectiveness, we develop a scalable video data synthesis pipeline that curates three diverse, high-quality training datasets: VideoChat3-Academic2M, VideoChat3-LV116K, and VideoChat3-OL617K, covering general, long-form, and streaming video scenarios, improving the model's generalization across domains. By integrating these designs, VideoChat3 achieves a rare balance of broad generalization and computational efficiency. Experiments across general, long-form, and streaming benchmarks demonstrate that VideoChat3 surpasses prior open-source models with equal or larger parameter counts with only 4B parameters and higher efficiency.

Dispider: Enabling Video LLMs with Active Real-Time Interaction via Disentangled Perception, Decision, and Reaction

Active Real-time interaction with video LLMs introduces a new paradigm for human-computer interaction, where the model not only understands user intent but also responds while continuously processing streaming video on the fly. Unlike offline video LLMs, which analyze the entire video before answering questions, active real-time interaction requires three capabilities: 1) Perception: real-time video monitoring and interaction capturing. 2) Decision: raising proactive interaction in proper situations, 3) Reaction: continuous interaction with users. However, inherent conflicts exist among the desired capabilities. The Decision and Reaction require a contrary Perception scale and grain, and the autoregressive decoding blocks the real-time Perception and Decision during the Reaction. To unify the conflicted capabilities within a harmonious system, we present Dispider, a system that disentangles Perception, Decision, and Reaction. Dispider features a lightweight proactive streaming video processing module that tracks the video stream and identifies optimal moments for interaction. Once the interaction is triggered, an asynchronous interaction module provides detailed responses, while the processing module continues to monitor the video in the meantime. Our disentangled and asynchronous design ensures timely, contextually accurate, and computationally efficient responses, making Dispider ideal for active real-time interaction for long-duration video streams. Experiments show that Dispider not only maintains strong performance in conventional video QA tasks, but also significantly surpasses previous online models in streaming scenario responses, thereby validating the effectiveness of our architecture. The code and model are released at https://github.com/Mark12Ding/Dispider.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 6, 2025 6

StreamMind: Unlocking Full Frame Rate Streaming Video Dialogue through Event-Gated Cognition

With the rise of real-world human-AI interaction applications, such as AI assistants, the need for Streaming Video Dialogue is critical. To address this need, we introduce StreamMind, a video LLM framework that achieves ultra-FPS streaming video processing (100 fps on a single A100) and enables proactive, always-on responses in real time, without explicit user intervention. To solve the key challenge of the contradiction between linear video streaming speed and quadratic transformer computation cost, we propose a novel perception-cognition interleaving paradigm named ''event-gated LLM invocation'', in contrast to the existing per-time-step LLM invocation. By introducing a Cognition Gate network between the video encoder and the LLM, LLM is only invoked when relevant events occur. To realize the event feature extraction with constant cost, we propose Event-Preserving Feature Extractor (EPFE) based on state-space method, generating a single perception token for spatiotemporal features. These techniques enable the video LLM with full-FPS perception and real-time cognition response. Experiments on Ego4D and SoccerNet streaming tasks, as well as standard offline benchmarks, demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in both model capability and real-time efficiency, paving the way for ultra-high-FPS applications, such as Game AI and interactive media. The code and data is available at https://aka.ms/StreamMind.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 6, 2025

InternLM-XComposer2.5-OmniLive: A Comprehensive Multimodal System for Long-term Streaming Video and Audio Interactions

Creating AI systems that can interact with environments over long periods, similar to human cognition, has been a longstanding research goal. Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant strides in open-world understanding. However, the challenge of continuous and simultaneous streaming perception, memory, and reasoning remains largely unexplored. Current MLLMs are constrained by their sequence-to-sequence architecture, which limits their ability to process inputs and generate responses simultaneously, akin to being unable to think while perceiving. Furthermore, relying on long contexts to store historical data is impractical for long-term interactions, as retaining all information becomes costly and inefficient. Therefore, rather than relying on a single foundation model to perform all functions, this project draws inspiration from the concept of the Specialized Generalist AI and introduces disentangled streaming perception, reasoning, and memory mechanisms, enabling real-time interaction with streaming video and audio input. The proposed framework InternLM-XComposer2.5-OmniLive (IXC2.5-OL) consists of three key modules: (1) Streaming Perception Module: Processes multimodal information in real-time, storing key details in memory and triggering reasoning in response to user queries. (2) Multi-modal Long Memory Module: Integrates short-term and long-term memory, compressing short-term memories into long-term ones for efficient retrieval and improved accuracy. (3) Reasoning Module: Responds to queries and executes reasoning tasks, coordinating with the perception and memory modules. This project simulates human-like cognition, enabling multimodal large language models to provide continuous and adaptive service over time.

  • 29 authors
·
Dec 12, 2024 3

StreamEQA: Towards Streaming Video Understanding for Embodied Scenarios

As embodied intelligence advances toward real-world deployment, the ability to continuously perceive and reason over streaming visual inputs becomes essential. In such settings, an agent must maintain situational awareness of its environment, comprehend the interactions with surrounding entities, and dynamically plan actions informed by past observations, current contexts, and anticipated future events. To facilitate progress in this direction, we introduce StreamEQA, the first benchmark designed for streaming video question answering in embodied scenarios. StreamEQA evaluates existing MLLMs along two orthogonal dimensions: Embodied and Streaming. Along the embodied dimension, we categorize the questions into three levels: perception, interaction, and planning, which progressively assess a model's ability to recognize fine-grained visual details, reason about agent-object interactions, and perform high-level goal-directed reasoning. For the streaming dimension, questions are divided into backward, real-time, and forward reasoning, with each mode relying on a distinct temporal context. Built upon 156 independent long videos, StreamEQA defines 42 tasks and generates approximately 21K question-answer pairs with precise timestamps through a hybrid pipeline combining automated generation and human refinement. Evaluations of 13 state-of-the-art video-LLMs reveal that, despite strong performance on conventional benchmarks, these models still struggle with streaming video understanding in embodied scenarios. We hope StreamEQA will catalyze research on streaming video understanding for embodied applications.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 3, 2025

OmniPro: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Omni-Proactive Streaming Video Understanding

Omni-proactive streaming video understanding, i.e., autonomously deciding when to speak and what to say from continuous audio-visual streams, is an emerging capability of omni-modal large language models. Existing benchmarks fall short in three key aspects: they rely primarily on visual signals, adopt polling or fixed-timestamp protocols instead of true proactive evaluation, and cover only a limited range of tasks, preventing reliable assessment and differentiation of omni-proactive streaming models. We present OmniPro, the first benchmark to jointly evaluate omni-modal perception, proactive responding, and diverse video understanding tasks. It comprises 2,700 human-verified samples spanning 9 sub-tasks and 3 cognitive levels, covering 6 basic video understanding capabilities. Notably, 84% of samples require audio signals (speech or non-speech), and each sample is annotated with modality-isolation labels to enable fine-grained multimodal analysis. We further introduce a dual-mode evaluation protocol: Probe mode assesses content understanding by querying the model before and after each ground-truth trigger, while Online mode evaluates full proactive ability by requiring models to autonomously decide when to respond in streaming input. Evaluating 11 representative models reveals three key findings: (1) audio provides consistent gains but with highly variable utilization across models, (2) performance degrades significantly over time, indicating limited long-horizon robustness, and (3) non-speech audio perception remains the weakest dimension.

  • 7 authors
·
May 17 1

FOLIO: Focused Semantic Memory for Streaming Video Understanding

In online streaming video understanding, a video stream continues to arrive and queries may be issued at any time. Because streaming frames grow without bound, the system must continuously compress and retain information from the observed video prefix while future frames and future queries remain unknown. The core challenge is deciding what information to retain and how to organize the maintained history: as this history grows with the stream, memory cost increases and many redundant visual details are retained, whereas later queries often depend on specific entities, actions, and their temporal changes. To address this challenge, we introduce FOLIO, a training-free focused semantic memory system that records important parts of the stream in higher detail while keeping surrounding context compact. As the stream arrives, FOLIO updates memory at the segment level, guided by a dynamic focus state, combining a short-term visual buffer with a long-term semantic memory organized around observed entities and linked to a visual-evidence cache. At query time, lightweight hybrid retrieval combines direct matching over the structured memory with semantic query expansion. FOLIO achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 82.0/69.1 Perception/Backward accuracy on OVO-Bench with Qwen3-VL-8B and 74.5 overall accuracy on StreamingBench, while substantially reducing the cost of maintaining streaming memory by reserving detailed records for focused entities and storing surrounding context compactly.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 13

StreamArena: Toward Continuous, Interactive, and Long-Horizon Agentic Streaming Video Understanding

Deploying autonomous multimodal agents in continuous, real-world environments requires them to ingest unbounded audio-visual streams and maintain hour-scale memory. However, current evaluations predominantly rely on brief clips and multiple-choice formats. This design allows minimal baselines that process only the last four frames to match or surpass complex streaming models, while answer options also expose language shortcuts. We introduce StreamArena, a benchmark for hour-scale, interactive streaming video understanding. StreamArena contains 243 full-length videos averaging 88.8 minutes and 3,646 rigorously annotated, open-ended question-answer pairs that evaluate real-time perception, historical retrospection, proactive interaction, and multimodal tool utilization. Evaluation across diverse systems exposes a tension between continuous interaction and long-horizon multimodal comprehension. Methods that retain only recent frames cannot recover distant events, methods that convert past observations into text lose visual evidence, and methods that repeatedly compress visual memory struggle to preserve fine-grained details over time. We address this tension with StreamMind, a two-tier architecture that assigns latency-critical interaction and proactive monitoring to independently scheduled frontend workers, while backend workers asynchronously construct persistent multimodal memory and perform historical recall and external search. StreamMind outperforms existing streaming baselines across all four capabilities and reduces query-to-answer latency by reusing persistent state.

OmniStream: Mastering Perception, Reconstruction and Action in Continuous Streams

Modern visual agents require representations that are general, causal, and physically structured to operate in real-time streaming environments. However, current vision foundation models remain fragmented, specializing narrowly in image semantic perception, offline temporal modeling, or spatial geometry. This paper introduces OmniStream, a unified streaming visual backbone that effectively perceives, reconstructs, and acts from diverse visual inputs. By incorporating causal spatiotemporal attention and 3D rotary positional embeddings (3D-RoPE), our model supports efficient, frame-by-frame online processing of video streams via a persistent KV-cache. We pre-train OmniStream using a synergistic multi-task framework coupling static and temporal representation learning, streaming geometric reconstruction, and vision-language alignment on 29 datasets. Extensive evaluations show that, even with a strictly frozen backbone, OmniStream achieves consistently competitive performance with specialized experts across image and video probing, streaming geometric reconstruction, complex video and spatial reasoning, as well as robotic manipulation (unseen at training). Rather than pursuing benchmark-specific dominance, our work demonstrates the viability of training a single, versatile vision backbone that generalizes across semantic, spatial, and temporal reasoning, i.e., a more meaningful step toward general-purpose visual understanding for interactive and embodied agents.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 12 2

TimeChat-Online: 80% Visual Tokens are Naturally Redundant in Streaming Videos

The rapid growth of online video platforms, particularly live streaming services, has created an urgent need for real-time video understanding systems. These systems must process continuous video streams and respond to user queries instantaneously, presenting unique challenges for current Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs). While existing VideoLLMs excel at processing complete videos, they face significant limitations in streaming scenarios due to their inability to handle dense, redundant frames efficiently. We introduce TimeChat-Online, a novel online VideoLLM that revolutionizes real-time video interaction. At its core lies our innovative Differential Token Drop (DTD) module, which addresses the fundamental challenge of visual redundancy in streaming videos. Drawing inspiration from human visual perception's Change Blindness phenomenon, DTD preserves meaningful temporal changes while filtering out static, redundant content between frames. Remarkably, our experiments demonstrate that DTD achieves an 82.8% reduction in video tokens while maintaining 98% performance on StreamingBench, revealing that over 80% of visual content in streaming videos is naturally redundant without requiring language guidance. To enable seamless real-time interaction, we present TimeChat-Online-139K, a comprehensive streaming video dataset featuring diverse interaction patterns including backward-tracing, current-perception, and future-responding scenarios. TimeChat-Online's unique Proactive Response capability, naturally achieved through continuous monitoring of video scene transitions via DTD, sets it apart from conventional approaches. Our extensive evaluation demonstrates TimeChat-Online's superior performance on streaming benchmarks (StreamingBench and OvOBench) and maintaining competitive results on long-form video tasks such as Video-MME and MLVU.

  • 14 authors
·
Apr 24, 2025 2

StreamingClaw Technical Report

Applications such as embodied intelligence rely on a real-time perception-decision-action closed loop, posing stringent challenges for streaming video understanding. However, current agents suffer from fragmented capabilities, such as supporting only offline video understanding, lacking long-term multimodal memory mechanisms, or struggling to achieve real-time reasoning and proactive interaction under streaming inputs. These shortcomings have become a key bottleneck for preventing them from sustaining perception, making real-time decisions, and executing actions in real-world environments. To alleviate these issues, we propose StreamingClaw, a unified agent framework for streaming video understanding and embodied intelligence. It is also an OpenClaw-compatible framework that supports real-time, multimodal streaming interaction. StreamingClaw integrates five core capabilities: (1) It supports real-time streaming reasoning. (2) It supports reasoning about future events and proactive interaction under the online evolution of interaction objectives. (3) It supports multimodal long-term storage, hierarchical evolution, and efficient retrieval of shared memory across multiple agents. (4) It supports a closed-loop of perception-decision-action. In addition to conventional tools and skills, it also provides streaming tools and action-centric skills tailored for real-world physical environments. (5) It is compatible with the OpenClaw framework, allowing it to fully leverage the resources and support of the open-source community. With these designs, StreamingClaw integrates online real-time reasoning, multimodal long-term memory, and proactive interaction within a unified framework. Moreover, by translating decisions into executable actions, it enables direct control of the physical world, supporting practical deployment of embodied interaction.

Video Streaming Thinking: VideoLLMs Can Watch and Think Simultaneously

Online Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) play a critical role in supporting responsive, real-time interaction. Existing methods focus on streaming perception, lacking a synchronized logical reasoning stream. However, directly applying test-time scaling methods incurs unacceptable response latency. To address this trade-off, we propose Video Streaming Thinking (VST), a novel paradigm for streaming video understanding. It supports a thinking while watching mechanism, which activates reasoning over incoming video clips during streaming. This design improves timely comprehension and coherent cognition while preserving real-time responsiveness by amortizing LLM reasoning latency over video playback. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive post-training pipeline that integrates VST-SFT, which structurally adapts the offline VideoLLM to causal streaming reasoning, and VST-RL, which provides end-to-end improvement through self-exploration in a multi-turn video interaction environment. Additionally, we devise an automated training-data synthesis pipeline that uses video knowledge graphs to generate high-quality streaming QA pairs, with an entity-relation grounded streaming Chain-of-Thought to enforce multi-evidence reasoning and sustained attention to the video stream. Extensive evaluations show that VST-7B performs strongly on online benchmarks, e.g. 79.5% on StreamingBench and 59.3% on OVO-Bench. Meanwhile, VST remains competitive on offline long-form or reasoning benchmarks. Compared with Video-R1, VST responds 15.7 times faster and achieves +5.4% improvement on VideoHolmes, demonstrating higher efficiency and strong generalization across diverse video understanding tasks. Code, data, and models will be released at https://github.com/1ranGuan/VST.

StreamOV: Streaming Omni-Video Understanding via Evidence-Guided Memory and Response Triggering

While streaming omni-video understanding demands continuous perception and proactive, real-time interaction, this crucial area remains largely under-explored. Current omni-modal methods are inherently designed for offline settings, limiting their applicability in streaming scenarios due to two fundamental flaws. First, they lack robust mechanisms to manage continuously growing audio-visual context over long horizons and cannot autonomously initiate responses at opportune moments. Second, existing benchmarks are predominantly confined to offline, single-turn question answering, failing to capture continuous, multi-turn streaming interactions. To bridge these gaps, we propose StreamOV, a novel Streaming Omni-Video understanding framework for efficient online audio-visual reasoning with bounded memory and proactive response triggering. Specifically, StreamOV introduces a multimodal evidence-guided long-short term memory that condenses historical audio-visual context into compact informative evidence under a fixed budget. It further employs a hidden-state-driven trigger to decide when to respond, avoiding explicit silence-token generation and external routers. We also curate SOVBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for online, multi-turn omni-modal evaluation. Extensive experiments show that StreamOV achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse streaming and omni-video benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness for both online and offline video understanding.

  • 9 authors
·
May 24

Think While Watching: Online Streaming Segment-Level Memory for Multi-Turn Video Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance on offline video understanding, but most are limited to offline inference or have weak online reasoning, making multi-turn interaction over continuously arriving video streams difficult. Existing streaming methods typically use an interleaved perception-generation paradigm, which prevents concurrent perception and generation and leads to early memory decay as streams grow, hurting long-range dependency modeling. We propose Think While Watching, a memory-anchored streaming video reasoning framework that preserves continuous segment-level memory during multi-turn interaction. We build a three-stage, multi-round chain-of-thought dataset and adopt a stage-matched training strategy, while enforcing strict causality through a segment-level streaming causal mask and streaming positional encoding. During inference, we introduce an efficient pipeline that overlaps watching and thinking and adaptively selects the best attention backend. Under both single-round and multi-round streaming input protocols, our method achieves strong results. Built on Qwen3-VL, it improves single-round accuracy by 2.6% on StreamingBench and by 3.79% on OVO-Bench. In the multi-round setting, it maintains performance while reducing output tokens by 56%. Code is available at: https://github.com/wl666hhh/Think_While_Watching/

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 12 2

Speak While Watching: Unleashing TRUE Real-Time Video Understanding Capability of Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance across many tasks, yet most systems remain limited to offline inference, requiring complete inputs before generating outputs. Recent streaming methods reduce latency by interleaving perception and generation, but still enforce a sequential perception-generation cycle, limiting real-time interaction. In this work, we target a fundamental bottleneck that arises when extending MLLMs to real-time video understanding: the global positional continuity constraint imposed by standard positional encoding schemes. While natural in offline inference, this constraint tightly couples perception and generation, preventing effective input-output parallelism. To address this limitation, we propose a parallel streaming framework that relaxes positional continuity through three designs: Overlapped, Group-Decoupled, and Gap-Isolated. These designs enable simultaneous perception and generation, allowing the model to process incoming inputs while producing responses in real time. Extensive experiments reveal that Group-Decoupled achieves the best efficiency-performance balance, maintaining high fluency and accuracy while significantly reducing latency. We further show that the proposed framework yields up to 2x acceleration under balanced perception-generation workloads, establishing a principled pathway toward speak-while-watching real-time systems. We make all our code publicly available: https://github.com/EIT-NLP/Speak-While-Watching.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 11

R-ACP: Real-Time Adaptive Collaborative Perception Leveraging Robust Task-Oriented Communications

Collaborative perception enhances sensing in multirobot and vehicular networks by fusing information from multiple agents, improving perception accuracy and sensing range. However, mobility and non-rigid sensor mounts introduce extrinsic calibration errors, necessitating online calibration, further complicated by limited overlap in sensing regions. Moreover, maintaining fresh information is crucial for timely and accurate sensing. To address calibration errors and ensure timely and accurate perception, we propose a robust task-oriented communication strategy to optimize online self-calibration and efficient feature sharing for Real-time Adaptive Collaborative Perception (R-ACP). Specifically, we first formulate an Age of Perceived Targets (AoPT) minimization problem to capture data timeliness of multi-view streaming. Then, in the calibration phase, we introduce a channel-aware self-calibration technique based on reidentification (Re-ID), which adaptively compresses key features according to channel capacities, effectively addressing calibration issues via spatial and temporal cross-camera correlations. In the streaming phase, we tackle the trade-off between bandwidth and inference accuracy by leveraging an Information Bottleneck (IB) based encoding method to adjust video compression rates based on task relevance, thereby reducing communication overhead and latency. Finally, we design a priority-aware network to filter corrupted features to mitigate performance degradation from packet corruption. Extensive studies demonstrate that our framework outperforms five baselines, improving multiple object detection accuracy (MODA) by 25.49% and reducing communication costs by 51.36% under severely poor channel conditions. Code will be made publicly available: github.com/fangzr/R-ACP.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 5, 2024

Cambrian-S: Towards Spatial Supersensing in Video

We argue that progress in true multimodal intelligence calls for a shift from reactive, task-driven systems and brute-force long context towards a broader paradigm of supersensing. We frame spatial supersensing as four stages beyond linguistic-only understanding: semantic perception (naming what is seen), streaming event cognition (maintaining memory across continuous experiences), implicit 3D spatial cognition (inferring the world behind pixels), and predictive world modeling (creating internal models that filter and organize information). Current benchmarks largely test only the early stages, offering narrow coverage of spatial cognition and rarely challenging models in ways that require true world modeling. To drive progress in spatial supersensing, we present VSI-SUPER, a two-part benchmark: VSR (long-horizon visual spatial recall) and VSC (continual visual spatial counting). These tasks require arbitrarily long video inputs yet are resistant to brute-force context expansion. We then test data scaling limits by curating VSI-590K and training Cambrian-S, achieving +30% absolute improvement on VSI-Bench without sacrificing general capabilities. Yet performance on VSI-SUPER remains limited, indicating that scale alone is insufficient for spatial supersensing. We propose predictive sensing as a path forward, presenting a proof-of-concept in which a self-supervised next-latent-frame predictor leverages surprise (prediction error) to drive memory and event segmentation. On VSI-SUPER, this approach substantially outperforms leading proprietary baselines, showing that spatial supersensing requires models that not only see but also anticipate, select, and organize experience.

  • 15 authors
·
Nov 6, 2025 5

Watch, Remember, Reason: Human-View Video Understanding with MLLMs

Video understanding is being rapidly transformed by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as research moves from short clips to long, multimodal, and knowledge-intensive video scenarios. These scenarios require models to handle sparse evidence, long-range dependencies, multimodal alignment, and reliable inference under limited computational budgets. This work presents a human-view perspective on LLM-based video understanding, organized around three functional abilities: watching, remembering, and reasoning. Rather than treating video tasks as isolated benchmarks, this view provides a unified structure for analyzing how video MLLMs acquire evidence, preserve context, and produce grounded outputs. We introduce a formulation that characterizes video understanding systems by their perceptual representations, memory states, reasoning traces, and final predictions. Based on this formulation, we identify challenges in spatio-temporal perception, efficient long-video processing, memory modeling, streaming understanding, and faithful reasoning. Representative methods are organized by their roles in video MLLM systems. Watching covers fine-grained, comprehensive, audio-visual, and efficient perception. Remembering includes offline and streaming memory, while reasoning covers text-only reasoning and thinking with videos. We further examine application domains such as egocentric, sports, instructional, medical, and narrative videos, and cover training datasets and evaluation benchmarks across task types, supervision formats, modalities, and capability dimensions. Finally, we outline open problems and future directions for scalable, memory-aware, and evidence-grounded video intelligence. Related works will be continuously traced at https://github.com/marinero4972/Awesome-HumanView-VideoUnderstanding.

StreamGaze: Gaze-Guided Temporal Reasoning and Proactive Understanding in Streaming Videos

Streaming video understanding requires models not only to process temporally incoming frames, but also to anticipate user intention for realistic applications like AR glasses. While prior streaming benchmarks evaluate temporal reasoning, none measure whether MLLMs can interpret or leverage human gaze signals within a streaming setting. To fill this gap, we introduce StreamGaze, the first benchmark designed to evaluate how effectively MLLMs use gaze for temporal and proactive reasoning in streaming videos. StreamGaze introduces gaze-guided past, present, and proactive tasks that comprehensively evaluate streaming video understanding. These tasks assess whether models can use real-time gaze to follow shifting attention and infer user intentions from only past and currently observed frames. To build StreamGaze, we develop a gaze-video QA generation pipeline that aligns egocentric videos with raw gaze trajectories via fixation extraction, region-specific visual prompting, and scanpath construction. This pipeline produces spatio-temporally grounded QA pairs that closely reflect human perceptual dynamics. Across all StreamGaze tasks, we observe substantial performance gaps between state-of-the-art MLLMs and human performance, revealing fundamental limitations in gaze-based temporal reasoning, intention modeling, and proactive prediction. We further provide detailed analyses of gaze-prompting strategies, reasoning behaviors, and task-specific failure modes, offering deeper insight into why current MLLMs struggle and what capabilities future models must develop. All data and code will be publicly released to support continued research in gaze-guided streaming video understanding.

adobe-research Adobe Research
·
Dec 1, 2025 2

StreamingBench: Assessing the Gap for MLLMs to Achieve Streaming Video Understanding

The rapid development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has expanded their capabilities from image comprehension to video understanding. However, most of these MLLMs focus primarily on offline video comprehension, necessitating extensive processing of all video frames before any queries can be made. This presents a significant gap compared to the human ability to watch, listen, think, and respond to streaming inputs in real time, highlighting the limitations of current MLLMs. In this paper, we introduce StreamingBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the streaming video understanding capabilities of MLLMs. StreamingBench assesses three core aspects of streaming video understanding: (1) real-time visual understanding, (2) omni-source understanding, and (3) contextual understanding. The benchmark consists of 18 tasks, featuring 900 videos and 4,500 human-curated QA pairs. Each video features five questions presented at different time points to simulate a continuous streaming scenario. We conduct experiments on StreamingBench with 13 open-source and proprietary MLLMs and find that even the most advanced proprietary MLLMs like Gemini 1.5 Pro and GPT-4o perform significantly below human-level streaming video understanding capabilities. We hope our work can facilitate further advancements for MLLMs, empowering them to approach human-level video comprehension and interaction in more realistic scenarios.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 5, 2024

Harnessing Streaming Video in the Wild

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly required to process unbounded video streams in applications such as video-call assistants, live commentary, and embodied robots. An ideal streaming system should support proactive interaction, long-horizon memory, and real-time processing, while resting on a VLM backbone capable of handling diverse in-the-wild streaming tasks. However, existing VLMs excel at offline video understanding but fall short in streaming capabilities and lack dedicated infrastructure for streaming deployment. We address this gap on three fronts. (i) For backbone capability, we construct Streaming-Train-248K, a streaming dataset paired with a novel training objective for adapting VLMs to streaming interaction and understanding. (ii) For real-world deployment, we introduce Streaming Harness, a plug-and-play system that endows any VLM with three core abilities: proactive interaction (per-second response decisions), long-term memory (12-hour context retention), and real-time processing (sub-second latency). (iii) To drive continued community progress on streaming capabilities, we design Streaming-Eval, a benchmark that reflects models' capabilities across diverse in-the-wild scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent gains from our approach across all core capabilities required for streaming video understanding. We will open-source our data, code, and benchmark to advance the community's shift from offline video understanding to deployable streaming intelligence.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 6

MotionStream: Real-Time Video Generation with Interactive Motion Controls

Current motion-conditioned video generation methods suffer from prohibitive latency (minutes per video) and non-causal processing that prevents real-time interaction. We present MotionStream, enabling sub-second latency with up to 29 FPS streaming generation on a single GPU. Our approach begins by augmenting a text-to-video model with motion control, which generates high-quality videos that adhere to the global text prompt and local motion guidance, but does not perform inference on the fly. As such, we distill this bidirectional teacher into a causal student through Self Forcing with Distribution Matching Distillation, enabling real-time streaming inference. Several key challenges arise when generating videos of long, potentially infinite time-horizons: (1) bridging the domain gap from training on finite length and extrapolating to infinite horizons, (2) sustaining high quality by preventing error accumulation, and (3) maintaining fast inference, without incurring growth in computational cost due to increasing context windows. A key to our approach is introducing carefully designed sliding-window causal attention, combined with attention sinks. By incorporating self-rollout with attention sinks and KV cache rolling during training, we properly simulate inference-time extrapolations with a fixed context window, enabling constant-speed generation of arbitrarily long videos. Our models achieve state-of-the-art results in motion following and video quality while being two orders of magnitude faster, uniquely enabling infinite-length streaming. With MotionStream, users can paint trajectories, control cameras, or transfer motion, and see results unfold in real-time, delivering a truly interactive experience.

adobe Adobe
·
Nov 3, 2025 7

Flash-VStream: Memory-Based Real-Time Understanding for Long Video Streams

Benefiting from the advancements in large language models and cross-modal alignment, existing multi-modal video understanding methods have achieved prominent performance in offline scenario. However, online video streams, as one of the most common media forms in the real world, have seldom received attention. Compared to offline videos, the 'dynamic' nature of online video streams poses challenges for the direct application of existing models and introduces new problems, such as the storage of extremely long-term information, interaction between continuous visual content and 'asynchronous' user questions. Therefore, in this paper we present Flash-VStream, a video-language model that simulates the memory mechanism of human. Our model is able to process extremely long video streams in real-time and respond to user queries simultaneously. Compared to existing models, Flash-VStream achieves significant reductions in inference latency and VRAM consumption, which is intimately related to performing understanding of online streaming video. In addition, given that existing video understanding benchmarks predominantly concentrate on offline scenario, we propose VStream-QA, a novel question answering benchmark specifically designed for online video streaming understanding. Comparisons with popular existing methods on the proposed benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our method for such challenging setting. To verify the generalizability of our approach, we further evaluate it on existing video understanding benchmarks and achieves state-of-the-art performance in offline scenarios as well. All code, models, and datasets are available at the https://invinciblewyq.github.io/vstream-page/

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 12, 2024 3

StreamingVLM: Real-Time Understanding for Infinite Video Streams

Vision-language models (VLMs) could power real-time assistants and autonomous agents, but they face a critical challenge: understanding near-infinite video streams without escalating latency and memory usage. Processing entire videos with full attention leads to quadratic computational costs and poor performance on long videos. Meanwhile, simple sliding window methods are also flawed, as they either break coherence or suffer from high latency due to redundant recomputation. In this paper, we introduce StreamingVLM, a model designed for real-time, stable understanding of infinite visual input. Our approach is a unified framework that aligns training with streaming inference. During inference, we maintain a compact KV cache by reusing states of attention sinks, a short window of recent vision tokens, and a long window of recent text tokens. This streaming ability is instilled via a simple supervised fine-tuning (SFT) strategy that applies full attention on short, overlapped video chunks, which effectively mimics the inference-time attention pattern without training on prohibitively long contexts. For evaluation, we build Inf-Streams-Eval, a new benchmark with videos averaging over two hours that requires dense, per-second alignment between frames and text. On Inf-Streams-Eval, StreamingVLM achieves a 66.18% win rate against GPT-4O mini and maintains stable, real-time performance at up to 8 FPS on a single NVIDIA H100. Notably, our SFT strategy also enhances general VQA abilities without any VQA-specific fine-tuning, improving performance on LongVideoBench by +4.30 and OVOBench Realtime by +5.96. Code is available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/streaming-vlm.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 10, 2025 3

Semantic-Aware Adaptive Visual Memory for Streaming Video Understanding

Online streaming video understanding requires models to process continuous visual inputs and respond to user queries in real time, where the unbounded stream and unpredictable query timing turn memory management into a central challenge. Existing methods typically compress visual tokens via visual similarity heuristics, or augment compression with KV-cache-level retrieval. However, compression decisions rarely incorporate semantic signals, and retrieval is often added after compression is finalized, making the two stages hard to coordinate. We present SAVEMem, a training-free dual-stage framework that brings semantic awareness into memory generation and lets the retrieval scope adapt per query. In Stage~1, SAVEMem builds a three-tier streaming memory online under a constant memory budget. A fixed pseudo-question bank provides a lightweight semantic prior, so that long-term retention is shaped by semantic salience rather than visual similarity alone. In Stage~2, SAVEMem performs query-aware retrieval over this memory. An anchor-conditioned recency gate adapts the retrieval scope from short-term to mid- and long-term memory based on whether the query targets the present or the distant past. Within this scope, late interaction between query and memory tokens selects candidate frames for answering. Applied to Qwen2.5-VL without training, SAVEMem improves the OVO-Bench overall score from 52.27 to 62.69 and yields consistent gains on StreamingBench and ODV-Bench, while reducing peak GPU memory by 48\% at 128 frames over the backbone.

  • 5 authors
·
May 7

H2VU-Benchmark: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Hierarchical Holistic Video Understanding

With the rapid development of multimodal models, the demand for assessing video understanding capabilities has been steadily increasing. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating video understanding exhibit significant limitations in coverage, task diversity, and scene adaptability. These shortcomings hinder the accurate assessment of models' comprehensive video understanding capabilities. To tackle this challenge, we propose a hierarchical and holistic video understanding (H2VU) benchmark designed to evaluate both general video and online streaming video comprehension. This benchmark contributes three key features: Extended video duration: Spanning videos from brief 3-second clips to comprehensive 1.5-hour recordings, thereby bridging the temporal gaps found in current benchmarks. Comprehensive assessment tasks: Beyond traditional perceptual and reasoning tasks, we have introduced modules for countercommonsense comprehension and trajectory state tracking. These additions test the models' deep understanding capabilities beyond mere prior knowledge. Enriched video data: To keep pace with the rapid evolution of current AI agents, we have expanded first-person streaming video datasets. This expansion allows for the exploration of multimodal models' performance in understanding streaming videos from a first-person perspective. Extensive results from H2VU reveal that existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) possess substantial potential for improvement in our newly proposed evaluation tasks. We expect that H2VU will facilitate advancements in video understanding research by offering a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of MLLMs.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 31, 2025

STREAM: Spatio-TempoRal Evaluation and Analysis Metric for Video Generative Models

Image generative models have made significant progress in generating realistic and diverse images, supported by comprehensive guidance from various evaluation metrics. However, current video generative models struggle to generate even short video clips, with limited tools that provide insights for improvements. Current video evaluation metrics are simple adaptations of image metrics by switching the embeddings with video embedding networks, which may underestimate the unique characteristics of video. Our analysis reveals that the widely used Frechet Video Distance (FVD) has a stronger emphasis on the spatial aspect than the temporal naturalness of video and is inherently constrained by the input size of the embedding networks used, limiting it to 16 frames. Additionally, it demonstrates considerable instability and diverges from human evaluations. To address the limitations, we propose STREAM, a new video evaluation metric uniquely designed to independently evaluate spatial and temporal aspects. This feature allows comprehensive analysis and evaluation of video generative models from various perspectives, unconstrained by video length. We provide analytical and experimental evidence demonstrating that STREAM provides an effective evaluation tool for both visual and temporal quality of videos, offering insights into area of improvement for video generative models. To the best of our knowledge, STREAM is the first evaluation metric that can separately assess the temporal and spatial aspects of videos. Our code is available at https://github.com/pro2nit/STREAM.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 30, 2024

Anchor Forcing: Anchor Memory and Tri-Region RoPE for Interactive Streaming Video Diffusion

Interactive long video generation requires prompt switching to introduce new subjects or events, while maintaining perceptual fidelity and coherent motion over extended horizons. Recent distilled streaming video diffusion models reuse a rolling KV cache for long-range generation, enabling prompt-switch interaction through re-cache at each switch. However, existing streaming methods still exhibit progressive quality degradation and weakened motion dynamics. We identify two failure modes specific to interactive streaming generation: (i) at each prompt switch, current cache maintenance cannot simultaneously retain KV-based semantic context and recent latent cues, resulting in weak boundary conditioning and reduced perceptual quality; and (ii) during distillation, unbounded time indexing induces a positional distribution shift from the pretrained backbone's bounded RoPE regime, weakening pretrained motion priors and long-horizon motion retention. To address these issues, we propose Anchor Forcing, a cache-centric framework with two designs. First, an anchor-guided re-cache mechanism stores KV states in anchor caches and warm-starts re-cache from these anchors at each prompt switch, reducing post-switch evidence loss and stabilizing perceptual quality. Second, a tri-region RoPE with region-specific reference origins, together with RoPE re-alignment distillation, reconciles unbounded streaming indices with the pretrained RoPE regime to better retain motion priors. Experiments on long videos show that our method improves perceptual quality and motion metrics over prior streaming baselines in interactive settings. Project page: https://github.com/vivoCameraResearch/Anchor-Forcing

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 12

MOSS-Video-Preview: Toward Real-Time Video Understanding via Cross-Attention

Video understanding is shifting from the offline paradigm -- taking a fully recorded video as input and producing a single answer after it ends -- toward real-time interaction, in which the model perceives new frames while still replying, revises its answer as new evidence appears, and remains silent when there is nothing to say. We present MOSS-Video-Preview to validate this paradigm. Our central claim is that perception must not be blocked by generation; its natural realization is a two-channel architecture. We argue that a cross-attention backbone is better suited to real-time vision-language fusion than the prevailing decoder-only design: visual features enter through a side channel rather than joining the autoregressive sequence, so perception and generation run on separate, non-blocking pathways -- reducing the frequency of visual processing and exposing a clean channel-wise interface for independent compression. We complement this with a data synthesis pipeline that converts dense captions into real-time understanding QA whose answers are revised to match what the model has perceived so far, and we specialize an offline model on these data to elicit real-time behavior. Our model trails the strong Qwen2.5-VL-7B baseline overall -- a gap we attribute primarily to data and scale rather than the architecture -- yet attains competitive offline video and multimodal understanding, remains robust on the spatial and fine-grained temporal reasoning central to real-time use, and acquires behaviors that offline models lack: continuous perception, answer revision, and timely silence. On a single H200 with 256 frames per video, it achieves about a 5x speedup in time to first token and 2.7x higher decoding throughput, with negligible degradation in offline ability. Our study of paradigm, architecture, and data outlines a viable path toward real-time video understanding.

  • 21 authors
·
May 31

Long-Horizon Streaming Video Generation via Hybrid Attention with Decoupled Distillation

Streaming video generation (SVG) distills a pretrained bidirectional video diffusion model into an autoregressive model equipped with sliding window attention (SWA). However, SWA inevitably loses distant history during long video generation, and its computational overhead remains a critical challenge to real-time deployment. In this work, we propose Hybrid Forcing, which jointly optimizes temporal information retention and computational efficiency through a hybrid attention design. First, we introduce lightweight linear temporal attention to preserve long-range dependencies beyond the sliding window. In particular, we maintain a compact key-value state to incrementally absorb evicted tokens, retaining temporal context with negligible memory and computational overhead. Second, we incorporate block-sparse attention into the local sliding window to reduce redundant computation within short-range modeling, reallocating computational capacity toward more critical dependencies. Finally, we introduce a decoupled distillation strategy tailored to the hybrid attention design. A few-step initial distillation is performed under dense attention, then the distillation of our proposed linear temporal and block-sparse attention is activated for streaming modeling, ensuring stable optimization. Extensive experiments on both short- and long-form video generation benchmarks demonstrate that Hybrid Forcing consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, our model achieves real-time, unbounded 832x480 video generation at 29.5 FPS on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU without quantization or model compression. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/leeruibin/hybrid-forcing.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 27

Think-as-You-See: Streaming Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Large Vision-Language Models

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit strong Chain-of-Thought (CoT) capabilities, yet most existing paradigms assume full-video availability before inference, a batch-style process misaligned with real-world video streams where information arrives sequentially. Motivated by the streaming nature of video data, we investigate two streaming reasoning paradigms for LVLMs. The first, an interleaved paradigm, alternates between receiving frames and producing partial reasoning but remains constrained by strictly ordered cache updates. To better match streaming inputs, we propose Think-as-You-See (TaYS), a unified framework enabling true concurrent reasoning. TaYS integrates parallelized CoT generation, stream-constrained training, and stream-parallel inference. It further employs temporally aligned reasoning units, streaming attention masks and positional encodings, and a dual KV-cache that decouples visual encoding from textual reasoning. We evaluate all paradigms on the Qwen2.5-VL family across representative video CoT tasks, including event dynamics analysis, causal reasoning, and thematic understanding. Experiments show that TaYS consistently outperforms both batch and interleaved baselines, improving reasoning performance while substantially reducing time-to-first-token (TTFT) and overall reasoning delay. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of data-aligned streaming reasoning in enabling efficient and responsive video understanding for LVLMs. We release our code at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/StreamingLLM/tree/main/TaYS{this repository.}

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 3

LiveEdit: Towards Real-Time Diffusion-Based Streaming Video Editing

Streaming video editing has made rapid progress, yet practical deployment is still limited by two core issues: maintaining stable backgrounds and non-edited regions over time, and achieving the low latency required for real-time interactive scenarios. Meanwhile, recent streaming video generation methods are mostly developed for synthesis and cannot be directly applied to editing due to the strict preservation requirement and region-specific control. In this work, we present a novel streaming video editing framework that performs causal, frame-by-frame editing with strong content preservation and real-time responsiveness. Our key design is a three-stage distillation pipeline that progressively transfers editing capability from a powerful bidirectional foundation model to an efficient unidirectional streaming editor, enabling stable long-horizon edits without sacrificing visual fidelity. To further support real-time deployment, we introduce an AR-oriented mask cache that reuses region-related computation across frames, substantially reducing redundant processing and accelerating inference. Finally, we establish a dedicated benchmark for streaming video editing. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art visual quality among streaming baselines while drastically boosting inference speed to 12.66 FPS, making it suitable for interactive and augmented reality applications.

VideoLLM-online: Online Video Large Language Model for Streaming Video

Recent Large Language Models have been enhanced with vision capabilities, enabling them to comprehend images, videos, and interleaved vision-language content. However, the learning methods of these large multimodal models typically treat videos as predetermined clips, making them less effective and efficient at handling streaming video inputs. In this paper, we propose a novel Learning-In-Video-Stream (LIVE) framework, which enables temporally aligned, long-context, and real-time conversation within a continuous video stream. Our LIVE framework comprises comprehensive approaches to achieve video streaming dialogue, encompassing: (1) a training objective designed to perform language modeling for continuous streaming inputs, (2) a data generation scheme that converts offline temporal annotations into a streaming dialogue format, and (3) an optimized inference pipeline to speed up the model responses in real-world video streams. With our LIVE framework, we built VideoLLM-online model upon Llama-2/Llama-3 and demonstrate its significant advantages in processing streaming videos. For instance, on average, our model can support streaming dialogue in a 5-minute video clip at over 10 FPS on an A100 GPU. Moreover, it also showcases state-of-the-art performance on public offline video benchmarks, such as recognition, captioning, and forecasting. The code, model, data, and demo have been made available at https://showlab.github.io/videollm-online.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 17, 2024 1

DAMO-StreamNet: Optimizing Streaming Perception in Autonomous Driving

Real-time perception, or streaming perception, is a crucial aspect of autonomous driving that has yet to be thoroughly explored in existing research. To address this gap, we present DAMO-StreamNet, an optimized framework that combines recent advances from the YOLO series with a comprehensive analysis of spatial and temporal perception mechanisms, delivering a cutting-edge solution. The key innovations of DAMO-StreamNet are (1) A robust neck structure incorporating deformable convolution, enhancing the receptive field and feature alignment capabilities (2) A dual-branch structure that integrates short-path semantic features and long-path temporal features, improving motion state prediction accuracy. (3) Logits-level distillation for efficient optimization, aligning the logits of teacher and student networks in semantic space. (4) A real-time forecasting mechanism that updates support frame features with the current frame, ensuring seamless streaming perception during inference. Our experiments demonstrate that DAMO-StreamNet surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving 37.8% (normal size (600, 960)) and 43.3% (large size (1200, 1920)) sAP without using extra data. This work not only sets a new benchmark for real-time perception but also provides valuable insights for future research. Additionally, DAMO-StreamNet can be applied to various autonomous systems, such as drones and robots, paving the way for real-time perception. The code is at https://github.com/zhiqic/DAMO-StreamNet.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 30, 2023

Wan-Streamer v0.2: Higher Resolution, Same Latency

We present Wan-Streamer v0.2, a latency-preserving upgrade of the native-streaming, end-to-end audio-visual interaction model. v0.2 keeps the v0.1 modeling formulation, but raises the interactive output stream from 192x336 to 640x368 while preserving approximately 200 ms model-side signal-to-signal latency at 25 FPS. The higher-resolution stream supports scene-grounded mid-shot agents whose posture, gaze, hands, nearby objects, and local scene layout remain legible during real-time conversation. To support the larger visual stream without adding user-visible delay, v0.2 keeps the thinker as a single-GPU low-latency path for streaming perception, the short language/state Transformer pass that builds the generation cache, and final decoding. The performer becomes a multi-GPU Ulysses-style context-parallel group for the expensive next-unit latent generation. Each performer rank writes incoming K/V into a pre-sharded local cache. The long high-resolution latent video sequence is split across ranks for denoising and gathered through Ulysses communication, while the much shorter audio latent sequence is generated without sequence sharding. In this split, the thinker's language/state computation reaches the performer only as K/V conditioning, so no separate language sequence has to be communicated inside the performer group. This concentrates additional hardware on visual generation while preserving the compact thinker-performer boundary, keeping total remote interaction latency at approximately 550 ms when a 350 ms bidirectional network budget is included.

Wan-AI Wan-AI
·
Jul 4 3

PEARL: Personalized Streaming Video Understanding Model

Human cognition of new concepts is inherently a streaming process: we continuously recognize new objects or identities and update our memories over time. However, current multimodal personalization methods are largely limited to static images or offline videos. This disconnects continuous visual input from instant real-world feedback, limiting their ability to provide the real-time, interactive personalized responses essential for future AI assistants. To bridge this gap, we first propose and formally define the novel task of Personalized Streaming Video Understanding (PSVU). To facilitate research in this new direction, we introduce PEARL-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed specifically to evaluate this challenging setting. It evaluates a model's ability to respond to personalized concepts at exact timestamps under two modes: (1) Frame-level, focusing on a specific person or object in discrete frames, and (2) a novel Video-level, focusing on personalized actions unfolding across continuous frames. PEARL-Bench comprises 132 unique videos and 2,173 fine-grained annotations with precise timestamps. Concept diversity and annotation quality are strictly ensured through a combined pipeline of automated generation and human verification. To tackle this challenging new setting, we further propose PEARL, a plug-and-play, training-free strategy that serves as a strong baseline. Extensive evaluations across 8 offline and online models demonstrate that PEARL achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, it brings consistent PSVU improvements when applied to 3 distinct architectures, proving to be a highly effective and robust strategy. We hope this work advances vision-language model (VLM) personalization and inspires further research into streaming personalized AI assistants. Code is available at https://github.com/Yuanhong-Zheng/PEARL.

LMM-VQA: Advancing Video Quality Assessment with Large Multimodal Models

The explosive growth of videos on streaming media platforms has underscored the urgent need for effective video quality assessment (VQA) algorithms to monitor and perceptually optimize the quality of streaming videos. However, VQA remains an extremely challenging task due to the diverse video content and the complex spatial and temporal distortions, thus necessitating more advanced methods to address these issues. Nowadays, large multimodal models (LMMs), such as GPT-4V, have exhibited strong capabilities for various visual understanding tasks, motivating us to leverage the powerful multimodal representation ability of LMMs to solve the VQA task. Therefore, we propose the first Large Multi-Modal Video Quality Assessment (LMM-VQA) model, which introduces a novel spatiotemporal visual modeling strategy for quality-aware feature extraction. Specifically, we first reformulate the quality regression problem into a question and answering (Q&A) task and construct Q&A prompts for VQA instruction tuning. Then, we design a spatiotemporal vision encoder to extract spatial and temporal features to represent the quality characteristics of videos, which are subsequently mapped into the language space by the spatiotemporal projector for modality alignment. Finally, the aligned visual tokens and the quality-inquired text tokens are aggregated as inputs for the large language model (LLM) to generate the quality score and level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LMM-VQA achieves state-of-the-art performance across five VQA benchmarks, exhibiting an average improvement of 5% in generalization ability over existing methods. Furthermore, due to the advanced design of the spatiotemporal encoder and projector, LMM-VQA also performs exceptionally well on general video understanding tasks, further validating its effectiveness. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Sueqk/LMM-VQA.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 26, 2024

Stream-T1: Test-Time Scaling for Streaming Video Generation

While Test-Time Scaling (TTS) offers a promising direction to enhance video generation without the surging costs of training, current test-time video generation methods based on diffusion models suffer from exorbitant candidate exploration costs and lack temporal guidance. To address these structural bottlenecks, we propose shifting the focus to streaming video generation. We identify that its chunk-level synthesis and few denoising steps are intrinsically suited for TTS, significantly lowering computational overhead while enabling fine-grained temporal control. Driven by this insight, we introduced Stream-T1, a pioneering comprehensive TTS framework exclusively tailored for streaming video generation. Specifically, Stream-T1 is composed of three units: (1) Stream -Scaled Noise Propagation, which actively refines the initial latent noise of the generating chunk using historically proven, high-quality previous chunk noise, effectively establishes temporal dependency and utilizing the historical Gaussian prior to guide the current generation; (2) Stream -Scaled Reward Pruning, which comprehensively evaluates generated candidates to strike an optimal balance between local spatial aesthetics and global temporal coherence by integrating immediate short-term assessments with sliding-window-based long-term evaluations; (3) Stream-Scaled Memory Sinking, which dynamically routes the context evicted from KV-cache into distinct updating pathways guided by the reward feedback, ensuring that previously generated visual information effectively anchors and guides the subsequent video stream. Evaluated on both 5s and 30s comprehensive video benchmarks, Stream-T1 demonstrates profound superiority, significantly improving temporal consistency, motion smoothness, and frame-level visual quality.

FrameXAI FrameX-AI
·
May 5 2

Wan-Streamer v0.1: End-to-end Real-time Interactive Foundation Models

We present Wan-Streamer, a native-streaming, end-to-end interactive foundation model designed from the ground up for real-time, low-latency, full-duplex audio-visual interaction. Wan-Streamer seamlessly models language, audio, and video as both input and output within a single Transformer, where the sequence is represented as interleaved visual, audio, and text input tokens together with visual, audio, and text output tokens, coordinated by block-causal attention for incremental streaming. Unlike cascaded interactive systems that rely on separate VAD, ASR, language, TTS, audio-driven animation, or video-generation modules, Wan-Streamer does not rely on external language, speech, avatar, or video-generation modules: perception, reasoning, generation, response timing, turn management, and cross-modal synchronization are learned jointly within one unified model, reducing pipeline latency and error accumulation. To support natural audio-visual responsiveness, we redesign the entire stack around streamability, including causal encoders, causal decoders, block-causal attention, and low-latency multimodal token scheduling, enabling streaming units as short as 160 ms at 25 fps. Wan-Streamer achieves approximately 200 ms model-side response latency and approximately 550 ms total interaction latency when combined with 350 ms bidirectional network latency, supporting sub-second duplex audio-visual communication. These results position Wan-Streamer as a unified, end-to-end, multimodal interactive foundation model for low-latency streaming interaction.

Wan-AI Wan-AI
·
Jun 22 13

StreamingT2V: Consistent, Dynamic, and Extendable Long Video Generation from Text

Text-to-video diffusion models enable the generation of high-quality videos that follow text instructions, making it easy to create diverse and individual content. However, existing approaches mostly focus on high-quality short video generation (typically 16 or 24 frames), ending up with hard-cuts when naively extended to the case of long video synthesis. To overcome these limitations, we introduce StreamingT2V, an autoregressive approach for long video generation of 80, 240, 600, 1200 or more frames with smooth transitions. The key components are:(i) a short-term memory block called conditional attention module (CAM), which conditions the current generation on the features extracted from the previous chunk via an attentional mechanism, leading to consistent chunk transitions, (ii) a long-term memory block called appearance preservation module, which extracts high-level scene and object features from the first video chunk to prevent the model from forgetting the initial scene, and (iii) a randomized blending approach that enables to apply a video enhancer autoregressively for infinitely long videos without inconsistencies between chunks. Experiments show that StreamingT2V generates high motion amount. In contrast, all competing image-to-video methods are prone to video stagnation when applied naively in an autoregressive manner. Thus, we propose with StreamingT2V a high-quality seamless text-to-long video generator that outperforms competitors with consistency and motion. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/StreamingT2V

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 21, 2024 2

Streaming Long Video Understanding with Large Language Models

This paper presents VideoStreaming, an advanced vision-language large model (VLLM) for video understanding, that capably understands arbitrary-length video with a constant number of video tokens streamingly encoded and adaptively selected. The challenge of video understanding in the vision language area mainly lies in the significant computational burden caused by the great number of tokens extracted from long videos. Previous works rely on sparse sampling or frame compression to reduce tokens. However, such approaches either disregard temporal information in a long time span or sacrifice spatial details, resulting in flawed compression. To address these limitations, our VideoStreaming has two core designs: Memory-Propagated Streaming Encoding and Adaptive Memory Selection. The Memory-Propagated Streaming Encoding architecture segments long videos into short clips and sequentially encodes each clip with a propagated memory. In each iteration, we utilize the encoded results of the preceding clip as historical memory, which is integrated with the current clip to distill a condensed representation that encapsulates the video content up to the current timestamp. After the encoding process, the Adaptive Memory Selection strategy selects a constant number of question-related memories from all the historical memories and feeds them into the LLM to generate informative responses. The question-related selection reduces redundancy within the memories, enabling efficient and precise video understanding. Meanwhile, the disentangled video extraction and reasoning design allows the LLM to answer different questions about a video by directly selecting corresponding memories, without the need to encode the whole video for each question. Our model achieves superior performance and higher efficiency on long video benchmarks, showcasing precise temporal comprehension for detailed question answering.

  • 7 authors
·
May 24, 2024

EchoTorrent: Towards Swift, Sustained, and Streaming Multi-Modal Video Generation

Recent multi-modal video generation models have achieved high visual quality, but their prohibitive latency and limited temporal stability hinder real-time deployment. Streaming inference exacerbates these issues, leading to pronounced multimodal degradation, such as spatial blurring, temporal drift, and lip desynchronization, which creates an unresolved efficiency-performance trade-off. To this end, we propose EchoTorrent, a novel schema with a fourfold design: (1) Multi-Teacher Training fine-tunes a pre-trained model on distinct preference domains to obtain specialized domain experts, which sequentially transfer domain-specific knowledge to a student model; (2) Adaptive CFG Calibration (ACC-DMD), which calibrates the audio CFG augmentation errors in DMD via a phased spatiotemporal schedule, eliminating redundant CFG computations and enabling single-pass inference per step; (3) Hybrid Long Tail Forcing, which enforces alignment exclusively on tail frames during long-horizon self-rollout training via a causal-bidirectional hybrid architecture, effectively mitigates spatiotemporal degradation in streaming mode while enhancing fidelity to reference frames; and (4) VAE Decoder Refiner through pixel-domain optimization of the VAE decoder to recover high-frequency details while circumventing latent-space ambiguities. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate that EchoTorrent achieves few-pass autoregressive generation with substantially extended temporal consistency, identity preservation, and audio-lip synchronization.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 14 1

Active Video Perception: Iterative Evidence Seeking for Agentic Long Video Understanding

Long video understanding (LVU) is challenging because answering real-world queries often depends on sparse, temporally dispersed cues buried in hours of mostly redundant and irrelevant content. While agentic pipelines improve video reasoning capabilities, prevailing frameworks rely on a query-agnostic captioner to perceive video information, which wastes computation on irrelevant content and blurs fine-grained temporal and spatial information. Motivated by active perception theory, we argue that LVU agents should actively decide what, when, and where to observe, and continuously assess whether the current observation is sufficient to answer the query. We present Active Video Perception (AVP), an evidence-seeking framework that treats the video as an interactive environment and acquires compact, queryrelevant evidence directly from pixels. Concretely, AVP runs an iterative plan-observe-reflect process with MLLM agents. In each round, a planner proposes targeted video interactions, an observer executes them to extract time-stamped evidence, and a reflector evaluates the sufficiency of the evidence for the query, either halting with an answer or triggering further observation. Across five LVU benchmarks, AVP achieves highest performance with significant improvements. Notably, AVP outperforms the best agentic method by 5.7% in average accuracy while only requires 18.4% inference time and 12.4% input tokens.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 5, 2025 2

LiveVLM: Efficient Online Video Understanding via Streaming-Oriented KV Cache and Retrieval

Recent developments in Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) have enabled models to process long video sequences and demonstrate remarkable performance. Nonetheless, studies predominantly focus on offline video question answering, neglecting memory usage and response speed that are essential in various real-world applications, such as Deepseek services, autonomous driving, and robotics. To mitigate these challenges, we propose LiveVLM, a training-free framework specifically designed for streaming, online video understanding and real-time interaction. Unlike existing works that process videos only after one question is posed, LiveVLM constructs an innovative streaming-oriented KV cache to process video streams in real-time, retain long-term video details and eliminate redundant KVs, ensuring prompt responses to user queries. For continuous video streams, LiveVLM generates and compresses video key-value tensors (video KVs) to reserve visual information while improving memory efficiency. Furthermore, when a new question is proposed, LiveVLM incorporates an online question-answering process that efficiently fetches both short-term and long-term visual information, while minimizing interference from redundant context. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiveVLM enables the foundation LLaVA-OneVision model to process 44times number of frames on the same device, and achieves up to 5times speedup in response speed compared with SoTA online methods at an input of 256 frames, while maintaining the same or better model performance.

  • 6 authors
·
May 21, 2025

VideoPerceiver: Enhancing Fine-Grained Temporal Perception in Video Multimodal Large Language Models

We propose VideoPerceiver, a novel video multimodal large language model (VMLLM) that enhances fine-grained perception in video understanding, addressing VMLLMs' limited ability to reason about brief actions in short clips or rare transient events in long videos. VideoPerceiver adopts a two-stage training framework. During supervised fine-tuning (SFT), we construct "key-information-missing" videos by extracting event-action keywords from captions, identifying corresponding key frames, and replacing them with adjacent frames. We jointly encode original and modified video tokens with text tokens, aligning intermediate visual representations with keywords via an auxiliary contrastive loss to enhance sensitivity to fine-grained motion cues. In reinforcement learning (RL), both video variants are fed into the model to generate descriptions, and a novel relative reward ensures responses from complete videos outperform those from degraded inputs, explicitly training the model to recover temporally precise action details. We also curate a dataset of 80,000 videos with fine-grained actions and transient events. Experiments show VideoPerceiver substantially outperforms state-of-the-art VMLLMs on fine-grained action understanding and rare event captioning benchmarks, while maintaining strong performance on standard tasks. By prioritizing task-relevant visual features, our work redefines video-language model training for fine-grained perception.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 23, 2025

StreamDiT: Real-Time Streaming Text-to-Video Generation

Recently, great progress has been achieved in text-to-video (T2V) generation by scaling transformer-based diffusion models to billions of parameters, which can generate high-quality videos. However, existing models typically produce only short clips offline, restricting their use cases in interactive and real-time applications. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing StreamDiT, a streaming video generation model. StreamDiT training is based on flow matching by adding a moving buffer. We design mixed training with different partitioning schemes of buffered frames to boost both content consistency and visual quality. StreamDiT modeling is based on adaLN DiT with varying time embedding and window attention. To practice the proposed method, we train a StreamDiT model with 4B parameters. In addition, we propose a multistep distillation method tailored for StreamDiT. Sampling distillation is performed in each segment of a chosen partitioning scheme. After distillation, the total number of function evaluations (NFEs) is reduced to the number of chunks in a buffer. Finally, our distilled model reaches real-time performance at 16 FPS on one GPU, which can generate video streams at 512p resolution. We evaluate our method through both quantitative metrics and human evaluation. Our model enables real-time applications, e.g. streaming generation, interactive generation, and video-to-video. We provide video results and more examples in our project website: <a href="https://cumulo-autumn.github.io/StreamDiT/">this https URL.</a>

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 4, 2025 5

LASER: Layer-wise Scale Alignment for Training-Free Streaming 4D Reconstruction

Recent feed-forward reconstruction models like VGGT and π^3 achieve impressive reconstruction quality but cannot process streaming videos due to quadratic memory complexity, limiting their practical deployment. While existing streaming methods address this through learned memory mechanisms or causal attention, they require extensive retraining and may not fully leverage the strong geometric priors of state-of-the-art offline models. We propose LASER, a training-free framework that converts an offline reconstruction model into a streaming system by aligning predictions across consecutive temporal windows. We observe that simple similarity transformation (Sim(3)) alignment fails due to layer depth misalignment: monocular scale ambiguity causes relative depth scales of different scene layers to vary inconsistently between windows. To address this, we introduce layer-wise scale alignment, which segments depth predictions into discrete layers, computes per-layer scale factors, and propagates them across both adjacent windows and timestamps. Extensive experiments show that LASER achieves state-of-the-art performance on camera pose estimation and point map reconstruction %quality with offline models while operating at 14 FPS with 6 GB peak memory on a RTX A6000 GPU, enabling practical deployment for kilometer-scale streaming videos. Project website: https://neu-vi.github.io/LASER/{https://neu-vi.github.io/LASER/}

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 15, 2025

EgoSAT: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Egocentric Streaming Interaction Understanding

We introduce EgoSAT, the first comprehensive benchmark for egocentric video reasoning in streaming settings, designed to evaluate the capabilities of modern vision-language models (VLMs). The benchmark targets streaming interaction understanding, where video frames arrive sequentially and models must continuously interpret evolving visual context. EgoSAT unifies several previously distinct tasks within a single streaming framework. In this formulation, queries about completed events correspond to retrospective reasoning, queries about ongoing activities require online understanding, and queries about future actions involve prospective anticipation. This unified setting requires models to reason about the past, present, and future while operating under the constraint that only previously observed frames are available. EgoSAT contains 1,997 unique videos spanning 165 hours of egocentric footage and around 4,800 high-quality question-answer pairs, carefully designed to probe reasoning across varying temporal contexts. Using this benchmark, we evaluate a diverse set of both open-weight and closed-weight VLMs, providing a systematic assessment of their ability for streaming interaction understanding. By distinguishing answerability and conducting diagnostics on confidence of models, we find existing models not only struggle with prospective and retrospective modeling, but also exhibit severe mis-calibration: confidence often fails to track inherent answerability, leading to dangerous "confidently wrong" behaviors. Project page: https://leiyj23.github.io/EgoSAT/

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 22

ARC-Hunyuan-Video-7B: Structured Video Comprehension of Real-World Shorts

Real-world user-generated short videos, especially those distributed on platforms such as WeChat Channel and TikTok, dominate the mobile internet. However, current large multimodal models lack essential temporally-structured, detailed, and in-depth video comprehension capabilities, which are the cornerstone of effective video search and recommendation, as well as emerging video applications. Understanding real-world shorts is actually challenging due to their complex visual elements, high information density in both visuals and audio, and fast pacing that focuses on emotional expression and viewpoint delivery. This requires advanced reasoning to effectively integrate multimodal information, including visual, audio, and text. In this work, we introduce ARC-Hunyuan-Video, a multimodal model that processes visual, audio, and textual signals from raw video inputs end-to-end for structured comprehension. The model is capable of multi-granularity timestamped video captioning and summarization, open-ended video question answering, temporal video grounding, and video reasoning. Leveraging high-quality data from an automated annotation pipeline, our compact 7B-parameter model is trained through a comprehensive regimen: pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, cold start, reinforcement learning (RL) post-training, and final instruction fine-tuning. Quantitative evaluations on our introduced benchmark ShortVid-Bench and qualitative comparisons demonstrate its strong performance in real-world video comprehension, and it supports zero-shot or fine-tuning with a few samples for diverse downstream applications. The real-world production deployment of our model has yielded tangible and measurable improvements in user engagement and satisfaction, a success supported by its remarkable efficiency, with stress tests indicating an inference time of just 10 seconds for a one-minute video on H20 GPU.

  • 18 authors
·
Jul 28, 2025 2

VideoFactory: Swap Attention in Spatiotemporal Diffusions for Text-to-Video Generation

We present VideoFactory, an innovative framework for generating high-quality open-domain videos. VideoFactory excels in producing high-definition (1376x768), widescreen (16:9) videos without watermarks, creating an engaging user experience. Generating videos guided by text instructions poses significant challenges, such as modeling the complex relationship between space and time, and the lack of large-scale text-video paired data. Previous approaches extend pretrained text-to-image generation models by adding temporal 1D convolution/attention modules for video generation. However, these approaches overlook the importance of jointly modeling space and time, inevitably leading to temporal distortions and misalignment between texts and videos. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that strengthens the interaction between spatial and temporal perceptions. In particular, we utilize a swapped cross-attention mechanism in 3D windows that alternates the "query" role between spatial and temporal blocks, enabling mutual reinforcement for each other. To fully unlock model capabilities for high-quality video generation, we curate a large-scale video dataset called HD-VG-130M. This dataset comprises 130 million text-video pairs from the open-domain, ensuring high-definition, widescreen and watermark-free characters. Objective metrics and user studies demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of per-frame quality, temporal correlation, and text-video alignment, with clear margins.

  • 7 authors
·
May 18, 2023

Chat with AI: The Surprising Turn of Real-time Video Communication from Human to AI

AI Video Chat emerges as a new paradigm for Real-time Communication (RTC), where one peer is not a human, but a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). This makes interaction between humans and AI more intuitive, as if chatting face-to-face with a real person. However, this poses significant challenges to latency, because the MLLM inference takes up most of the response time, leaving very little time for video streaming. Due to network uncertainty and instability, transmission latency becomes a critical bottleneck preventing AI from being like a real person. To address this, we propose Artic, an AI-oriented Real-time Communication framework, exploring the network requirement shift from "humans watching video" to "AI understanding video". To reduce bitrate dramatically while maintaining MLLM accuracy, we propose Context-Aware Video Streaming that recognizes the importance of each video region for chat and allocates bitrate almost exclusively to chat-important regions. To avoid packet retransmission, we propose Loss-Resilient Adaptive Frame Rate that leverages previous frames to substitute for lost/delayed frames while avoiding bitrate waste. To evaluate the impact of video streaming quality on MLLM accuracy, we build the first benchmark, named Degraded Video Understanding Benchmark (DeViBench). Finally, we discuss some open questions and ongoing solutions for AI Video Chat.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 14, 2025 2

VideoScan: Enabling Efficient Streaming Video Understanding via Frame-level Semantic Carriers

This paper introduces VideoScan, an efficient vision-language model (VLM) inference framework designed for real-time video interaction that effectively comprehends and retains streamed video inputs while delivering rapid and accurate responses. A longstanding challenge in video understanding--particularly for long-term or real-time applications--stems from the substantial computational overhead caused by the extensive length of visual tokens. To address this, VideoScan employs a single semantic carrier token to represent each frame, progressively reducing computational and memory overhead during its two-phase inference process: prefilling and decoding. The embedding of the semantic carrier token is derived from an optimized aggregation of frame-level visual features, ensuring compact yet semantically rich representations. Critically, the corresponding key-value pairs are trained to retain contextual semantics from prior frames, enabling efficient memory management without sacrificing temporal coherence. During inference, the visual tokens of each frame are processed only once during the prefilling phase and subsequently discarded in the decoding stage, eliminating redundant computations. This design ensures efficient VLM inference even under stringent real-time constraints. Comprehensive experiments on diverse offline and online benchmarks demonstrate that LLaVA-Video, supported by our method, achieves up to sim 5times and 1.29times speedups compared to its original version and previous efficient streaming video understanding approaches, respectively. Crucially, these improvements are attained while maintaining competitive performance and ensuring stable GPU memory consumption (consistently sim 18GB, independent of video duration).

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 12, 2025

SVBench: A Benchmark with Temporal Multi-Turn Dialogues for Streaming Video Understanding

Despite the significant advancements of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on established benchmarks, there remains a notable gap in suitable evaluation regarding their applicability in the emerging domain of long-context streaming video understanding. Current benchmarks for video understanding typically emphasize isolated single-instance text inputs and fail to evaluate the capacity to sustain temporal reasoning throughout the entire duration of video streams. To address these limitations, we introduce SVBench, a pioneering benchmark with temporal multi-turn question-answering chains specifically designed to thoroughly assess the capabilities of streaming video understanding of current LVLMs. We design a semi-automated annotation pipeline to obtain 49,979 Question-Answer (QA) pairs of 1,353 streaming videos, which includes generating QA chains that represent a series of consecutive multi-turn dialogues over video segments and constructing temporal linkages between successive QA chains. Our experimental results, obtained from 14 models in dialogue and streaming evaluations, reveal that while the closed-source GPT-4o outperforms others, most open-source LVLMs struggle with long-context streaming video understanding. We also construct a StreamingChat model, which significantly outperforms open-source LVLMs on our SVBench and achieves comparable performance on diverse vision-language benchmarks. We expect SVBench to advance the research of streaming video understanding by providing a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of current LVLMs. Our benchmark and model can be accessed at https://yzy-bupt.github.io/SVBench.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 15, 2025

VideoLLM-MoD: Efficient Video-Language Streaming with Mixture-of-Depths Vision Computation

A well-known dilemma in large vision-language models (e.g., GPT-4, LLaVA) is that while increasing the number of vision tokens generally enhances visual understanding, it also significantly raises memory and computational costs, especially in long-term, dense video frame streaming scenarios. Although learnable approaches like Q-Former and Perceiver Resampler have been developed to reduce the vision token burden, they overlook the context causally modeled by LLMs (i.e., key-value cache), potentially leading to missed visual cues when addressing user queries. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to reduce vision compute by leveraging redundant vision tokens "skipping layers" rather than decreasing the number of vision tokens. Our method, VideoLLM-MoD, is inspired by mixture-of-depths LLMs and addresses the challenge of numerous vision tokens in long-term or streaming video. Specifically, for each transformer layer, we learn to skip the computation for a high proportion (e.g., 80\%) of vision tokens, passing them directly to the next layer. This approach significantly enhances model efficiency, achieving approximately \textasciitilde42\% time and \textasciitilde30\% memory savings for the entire training. Moreover, our method reduces the computation in the context and avoid decreasing the vision tokens, thus preserving or even improving performance compared to the vanilla model. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of VideoLLM-MoD, showing its state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks, including narration, forecasting, and summarization tasks in COIN, Ego4D, and Ego-Exo4D datasets.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 29, 2024

Script-a-Video: Deep Structured Audio-visual Captions via Factorized Streams and Relational Grounding

Advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are transforming video captioning from a descriptive endpoint into a semantic interface for both video understanding and generation. However, the dominant paradigm still casts videos as monolithic narrative paragraphs that entangle visual, auditory, and identity information. This dense coupling not only compromises representational fidelity but also limits scalability, since even local edits can trigger global rewrites. To address this structural bottleneck, we propose Multi-Stream Scene Script (MTSS), a novel paradigm that replaces monolithic text with factorized and explicitly grounded scene descriptions. MTSS is built on two core principles: Stream Factorization, which decouples a video into complementary streams (Reference, Shot, Event, and Global), and Relational Grounding, which reconnects these isolated streams through explicit identity and temporal links to maintain holistic video consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MTSS consistently enhances video understanding across various models, achieving an average reduction of 25% in the total error rate on Video-SALMONN-2 and an average performance gain of 67% on the Daily-Omni reasoning benchmark. It also narrows the performance gap between smaller and larger MLLMs, indicating a substantially more learnable caption interface. Finally, even without architectural adaptation, replacing monolithic prompts with MTSS in multi-shot video generation yields substantial human-rated improvements: a 45% boost in cross-shot identity consistency, a 56% boost in audio-visual alignment, and a 71% boost in temporal controllability.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 14

Mage-VL: An Efficient Codec-Native Streaming Multimodal Foundation Model

Standard vision-language models (VLMs) suffer from Moravec's paradox: they excel at complex offline visual reasoning but struggle with simple streaming perception tasks and process them inefficiently. We present Mage-VL, an efficient codec-native streaming foundation model for real-time multimodal understanding and interaction. At its core, our custom tokenizer, Mage-ViT, replaces uniform frame sampling by selectively encoding dynamic, entropy-rich regions using motion vectors and residual energy across sparse anchor (I) and predicted (P) frames. Operating at a 16 x 16 patch level, this reduces visual token consumption by over 75% while preserving spatiotemporal context. Trained from scratch on approximately 560M unlabeled images and 100M unlabeled video frames, Mage-ViT matches or outperforms flagship encoders trained on billions of image-text pairs. We establish AI4AI data pipelines encompassing prompt-code joint optimization for multimodal captioning and AI-driven performance diagnosis to guide training recipes. Furthermore, through a bio-inspired dual-system architecture - a lightweight System 1 event gate and a causal System 2 decoder - Mage-VL enables proactive streaming perception. Extensive evaluations show that Mage-VL-4B matches Qwen3-VL-4B on static tasks while achieving strong gains in video understanding and 2D/3D spatial reasoning, with up to a 3.5x wall-clock inference speedup, and comprehensively surpasses the 15B Phi-4-reasoning-vision baseline. Beyond model artifacts, we deliver seven key empirical findings covering pre-training data efficiency, variable-resolution scaling, codec system acceleration, VideoQA SFT redundancy, motion-spatial synergy, AI4AI data pipelines, and Zero-Vision SFT for multimodal RL.

microsoft Microsoft
·
Jul 26 2

Spatial-TTT: Streaming Visual-based Spatial Intelligence with Test-Time Training

Humans perceive and understand real-world spaces through a stream of visual observations. Therefore, the ability to streamingly maintain and update spatial evidence from potentially unbounded video streams is essential for spatial intelligence. The core challenge is not simply longer context windows but how spatial information is selected, organized, and retained over time. In this paper, we propose Spatial-TTT towards streaming visual-based spatial intelligence with test-time training (TTT), which adapts a subset of parameters (fast weights) to capture and organize spatial evidence over long-horizon scene videos. Specifically, we design a hybrid architecture and adopt large-chunk updates parallel with sliding-window attention for efficient spatial video processing. To further promote spatial awareness, we introduce a spatial-predictive mechanism applied to TTT layers with 3D spatiotemporal convolution, which encourages the model to capture geometric correspondence and temporal continuity across frames. Beyond architecture design, we construct a dataset with dense 3D spatial descriptions, which guides the model to update its fast weights to memorize and organize global 3D spatial signals in a structured manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Spatial-TTT improves long-horizon spatial understanding and achieves state-of-the-art performance on video spatial benchmarks. Project page: https://liuff19.github.io/Spatial-TTT.

Video-LMM Post-Training: A Deep Dive into Video Reasoning with Large Multimodal Models

Video understanding represents the most challenging frontier in computer vision, requiring models to reason about complex spatiotemporal relationships, long-term dependencies, and multimodal evidence. The recent emergence of Video-Large Multimodal Models (Video-LMMs), which integrate visual encoders with powerful decoder-based language models, has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in video understanding tasks. However, the critical phase that transforms these models from basic perception systems into sophisticated reasoning engines, post-training, remains fragmented across the literature. This survey provides the first comprehensive examination of post-training methodologies for Video-LMMs, encompassing three fundamental pillars: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with chain-of-thought, reinforcement learning (RL) from verifiable objectives, and test-time scaling (TTS) through enhanced inference computation. We present a structured taxonomy that clarifies the roles, interconnections, and video-specific adaptations of these techniques, addressing unique challenges such as temporal localization, spatiotemporal grounding, long video efficiency, and multimodal evidence integration. Through systematic analysis of representative methods, we synthesize key design principles, insights, and evaluation protocols while identifying critical open challenges in reward design, scalability, and cost-performance optimization. We further curate essential benchmarks, datasets, and metrics to facilitate rigorous assessment of post-training effectiveness. This survey aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a unified framework for advancing Video-LMM capabilities. Additional resources and updates are maintained at: https://github.com/yunlong10/Awesome-Video-LMM-Post-Training

  • 27 authors
·
Oct 6, 2025 2

Video Reality Test: Can AI-Generated ASMR Videos fool VLMs and Humans?

Recent advances in video generation have produced vivid content that are often indistinguishable from real videos, making AI-generated video detection an emerging societal challenge. Prior AIGC detection benchmarks mostly evaluate video without audio, target broad narrative domains, and focus on classification solely. Yet it remains unclear whether state-of-the-art video generation models can produce immersive, audio-paired videos that reliably deceive humans and VLMs. To this end, we introduce Video Reality Test, an ASMR-sourced video benchmark suite for testing perceptual realism under tight audio-visual coupling, featuring the following dimensions: (i) Immersive ASMR video-audio sources. Built on carefully curated real ASMR videos, the benchmark targets fine-grained action-object interactions with diversity across objects, actions, and backgrounds. (ii) Peer-Review evaluation. An adversarial creator-reviewer protocol where video generation models act as creators aiming to fool reviewers, while VLMs serve as reviewers seeking to identify fakeness. Our experimental findings show: The best creator Veo3.1-Fast even fools most VLMs: the strongest reviewer (Gemini 2.5-Pro) achieves only 56\% accuracy (random 50\%), far below that of human experts (81.25\%). Adding audio improves real-fake discrimination, yet superficial cues such as watermarks can still significantly mislead models. These findings delineate the current boundary of video generation realism and expose limitations of VLMs in perceptual fidelity and audio-visual consistency. Our code is available at https://github.com/video-reality-test/video-reality-test.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 15, 2025 4

Reward Forcing: Efficient Streaming Video Generation with Rewarded Distribution Matching Distillation

Efficient streaming video generation is critical for simulating interactive and dynamic worlds. Existing methods distill few-step video diffusion models with sliding window attention, using initial frames as sink tokens to maintain attention performance and reduce error accumulation. However, video frames become overly dependent on these static tokens, resulting in copied initial frames and diminished motion dynamics. To address this, we introduce Reward Forcing, a novel framework with two key designs. First, we propose EMA-Sink, which maintains fixed-size tokens initialized from initial frames and continuously updated by fusing evicted tokens via exponential moving average as they exit the sliding window. Without additional computation cost, EMA-Sink tokens capture both long-term context and recent dynamics, preventing initial frame copying while maintaining long-horizon consistency. Second, to better distill motion dynamics from teacher models, we propose a novel Rewarded Distribution Matching Distillation (Re-DMD). Vanilla distribution matching treats every training sample equally, limiting the model's ability to prioritize dynamic content. Instead, Re-DMD biases the model's output distribution toward high-reward regions by prioritizing samples with greater dynamics rated by a vision-language model. Re-DMD significantly enhances motion quality while preserving data fidelity. We include both quantitative and qualitative experiments to show that Reward Forcing achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks while enabling high-quality streaming video generation at 23.1 FPS on a single H100 GPU.

  • 12 authors
·
Dec 4, 2025 3

Video2LoRA: Parametric Video Internalization for Vision-Language Models

Processing video in vision-language models is expensive: each frame occupies hundreds of tokens, and inference cost scales with every frame and every repeated query. We introduce Video2LoRA, a method for parametric video internalization. A perceiver hypernetwork reads the intermediate representations produced layer-by-layer as a frozen VLM encodes a video, and generates a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapter in a single forward pass. Unlike standard LoRA fine-tuning, which requires iterative gradient updates, Video2LoRA predicts these weights directly from the video. Trained for SmolVLM2 500M and 2.2B on video summarization and captioning, Video2LoRA enables the same frozen VLM to answer queries from the adapter alone, with zero visual tokens in its context at query time. Video2LoRA is statistically non-inferior and equivalent to direct video-in-context inference across all five captioning benchmarks at both model scales, and across seven of eight video question answering benchmark-scale pairings. Although trained only on 12 frames at 384px, it remains stable up to 1,024 frames and 1024px, where direct video-in-context inference often degenerates. Across this sweep, it reduces answer-time visual-token load by up to 1,500x and query TTFT by 6-80x, while preserving video-faithful outputs. We also find that independently generated adapters for non-overlapping video segments can compose in rank space, suggesting a path toward chunked long-video internalization.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 2 2

PerceptionComp: A Video Benchmark for Complex Perception-Centric Reasoning

We introduce PerceptionComp, a manually annotated benchmark for complex, long-horizon, perception-centric video reasoning. PerceptionComp is designed so that no single moment is sufficient: answering each question requires multiple temporally separated pieces of visual evidence and compositional constraints under conjunctive and sequential logic, spanning perceptual subtasks such as objects, attributes, relations, locations, actions, and events, and requiring skills including semantic recognition, visual correspondence, temporal reasoning, and spatial reasoning. The benchmark contains 1,114 highly complex questions on 279 videos from diverse domains including city walk tours, indoor villa tours, video games, and extreme outdoor sports, with 100% manual annotation. Human studies show that PerceptionComp requires substantial test-time thinking and repeated perception steps: participants take much longer than on prior benchmarks, and accuracy drops to near chance (18.97%) when rewatching is disallowed. State-of-the-art MLLMs also perform substantially worse on PerceptionComp than on existing benchmarks: the best model in our evaluation, Gemini-3-Flash, reaches only 45.96% accuracy in the five-choice setting, while open-source models remain below 40%. These results suggest that perception-centric long-horizon video reasoning remains a major bottleneck, and we hope PerceptionComp will help drive progress in perceptual reasoning.

  • 12 authors
·
Mar 27 2

MiniWorld: Democratizing the Training of Video World Models from Scratch

Video world models predict future observations conditioned on historical observations and control signals, enabling long-horizon generation through autoregressive state transitions. Unlike conventional video generation models that primarily capture visual appearance and motion, video world models learn the underlying dynamics governing environment evolution under agent actions, providing a foundation for embodied AI and interactive simulation. Recent progress has largely relied on adapting pretrained video generation models through post-training or distillation. Although effective, these approaches often require complex training pipelines, substantial computational resources, and suffer from the mismatch between bidirectional pretraining and causal streaming inference. Recent studies have shown that training autoregressive video world models from scratch is feasible and scalable. However, the community still lacks a lightweight, transparent, and fully reproducible baseline trainable end-to-end with modest computational resources. We present MiniWorld, a reproducible framework for training streaming video world models from scratch. MiniWorld employs a block-causal Video Diffusion Transformer trained with Flow Matching in the latent space of a pretrained Video VAE. Building on Diffusion Forcing, it adopts a chunk-wise non-decreasing noise schedule and two-stage continued training to improve temporal modeling and stability. During inference, MiniWorld combines a rolling KV cache with pipelined asynchronous denoising for efficient streaming generation under bounded computation. The entire model can be trained within several days on a single 8-GPU server. By releasing the training and inference codebase and pretrained checkpoints, we hope MiniWorld will facilitate future research on video world modeling.

LLaVA-OneVision-2: Towards Next-Generation Perceptual Intelligence

We introduce LLaVA-OneVision-2 (LLaVA-OV-2), the most capable vision-language model in the LLaVA-OneVision series to date, achieving superior performance across a broad range of multimodal benchmarks. The model builds on a native OneVision-Encoder and incorporates Windowed Attention for efficient local computation while maintaining native resolution. Its key advance is codec-stream tokenization: it treats compressed video as a continuous bit-cost stream, where bit-cost dynamics determine adaptive temporal groups, and motion-residual cues select salient spatial evidence into compact visual canvases. This allocation concentrates a limited token budget on event-bearing content, enabling more stable long-video token compression than fixed groups of pictures. A shared 3D RoPE further places codec canvases, sampled frames, and images in a unified spatiotemporal coordinate system. Furthermore, we build the LLaVA-OV-2 data and training stack around large-scale open supervision: approximately 8M re-captioned video samples for pretraining, a 4M-sample spatial corpus for fine-tuning. We also introduce JumpScore, a temporal-localization benchmark targeting fine-grained grounding in high-frequency, densely repeated motion, a regime underrepresented by existing video evaluations. A standout capability of LLaVA-OV-2 is its unified perception across video understanding, temporal grounding, spatial grounding, and manipulation-trace reasoning. On JumpScore, LLaVA-OneVision-2-8B reaches 74.9 JumpScore mAP, surpassing Qwen3-VL-8B (30.1) by +44.8 points; under matched visual-token budgets on the same benchmark, codec-stream inputs improve temporal grounding over frame sampling by +9.7 points. Across standard benchmarks, LLaVA-OneVision-2-8B further outperforms Qwen3-VL-8B by +4.3 average points on video tasks, +5.3 on spatial tasks, and +15.6 average J&F on tracking tasks.

  • 30 authors
·
May 24 2

Streaming Video Question-Answering with In-context Video KV-Cache Retrieval

We propose ReKV, a novel training-free approach that enables efficient streaming video question-answering (StreamingVQA), by seamlessly integrating with existing Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs). Traditional VideoQA systems struggle with long videos, as they must process entire videos before responding to queries, and repeat this process for each new question. In contrast, our approach analyzes long videos in a streaming manner, allowing for prompt responses as soon as user queries are received. Building on a common Video-LLM, we first incorporate a sliding-window attention mechanism, ensuring that input frames attend to a limited number of preceding frames, thereby reducing computational overhead. To prevent information loss, we store processed video key-value caches (KV-Caches) in RAM and disk, reloading them into GPU memory as needed. Additionally, we introduce a retrieval method that leverages an external retriever or the parameters within Video-LLMs to retrieve only query-relevant KV-Caches, ensuring both efficiency and accuracy in question answering. ReKV enables the separation of video encoding and question-answering across different processes and GPUs, significantly enhancing the efficiency of StreamingVQA. Through comprehensive experimentation, we validate the efficacy and practicality of our approach, which significantly boosts efficiency and enhances applicability over existing VideoQA models.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 1, 2025

VideoScaffold: Elastic-Scale Visual Hierarchies for Streaming Video Understanding in MLLMs

Understanding long videos with multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remains challenging due to the heavy redundancy across frames and the need for temporally coherent representations. Existing static strategies, such as sparse sampling, frame compression, and clustering, are optimized for offline settings and often produce fragmented or over-compressed outputs when applied to continuous video streams. We present VideoScaffold, a dynamic representation framework designed for streaming video understanding. It adaptively adjusts event granularity according to video duration while preserving fine-grained visual semantics. VideoScaffold introduces two key components: Elastic-Scale Event Segmentation (EES), which performs prediction-guided segmentation to dynamically refine event boundaries, and Hierarchical Event Consolidation (HEC), which progressively aggregates semantically related segments into multi-level abstractions. Working in concert, EES and HEC enable VideoScaffold to transition smoothly from fine-grained frame understanding to abstract event reasoning as the video stream unfolds. Extensive experiments across both offline and streaming video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that VideoScaffold achieves state-of-the-art performance. The framework is modular and plug-and-play, seamlessly extending existing image-based MLLMs to continuous video comprehension. The code is available at https://github.com/zheng980629/VideoScaffold.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 22, 2025

An LMM for Efficient Video Understanding via Reinforced Compression of Video Cubes

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) uniformly perceive video frames, creating computational inefficiency for videos with inherently varying temporal information density. This paper present Quicksviewer, an LMM with new perceiving paradigm that partitions a video of nonuniform density into varying cubes using Gumbel Softmax, followed by a unified resampling for each cube to achieve efficient video understanding. This simple and intuitive approach dynamically compress video online based on its temporal density, significantly reducing spatiotemporal redundancy (overall 45times compression rate), while enabling efficient training with large receptive field. We train the model from a language backbone through three progressive stages, each incorporating lengthy videos on average of 420s/1fps thanks to the perceiving efficiency. With only 0.8M total video-text samples for training, our model outperforms the direct baseline employing a fixed partitioning strategy by a maximum of 8.72 in accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness in performance. On Video-MME, Quicksviewer achieves SOTA under modest sequence lengths using just up to 5\% of tokens per frame required by baselines. With this paradigm, scaling up the number of input frames reveals a clear power law of the model capabilities. It is also empirically verified that the segments generated by the cubing network can help for analyzing continuous events in videos.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 21, 2025 3

SAMWISE: Infusing wisdom in SAM2 for Text-Driven Video Segmentation

Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) relies on natural language expressions to segment an object in a video clip. Existing methods restrict reasoning either to independent short clips, losing global context, or process the entire video offline, impairing their application in a streaming fashion. In this work, we aim to surpass these limitations and design an RVOS method capable of effectively operating in streaming-like scenarios while retaining contextual information from past frames. We build upon the Segment-Anything 2 (SAM2) model, that provides robust segmentation and tracking capabilities and is naturally suited for streaming processing. We make SAM2 wiser, by empowering it with natural language understanding and explicit temporal modeling at the feature extraction stage, without fine-tuning its weights, and without outsourcing modality interaction to external models. To this end, we introduce a novel adapter module that injects temporal information and multi-modal cues in the feature extraction process. We further reveal the phenomenon of tracking bias in SAM2 and propose a learnable module to adjust its tracking focus when the current frame features suggest a new object more aligned with the caption. Our proposed method, SAMWISE, achieves state-of-the-art across various benchmarks, by adding a negligible overhead of just 4.2 M parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/ClaudiaCuttano/SAMWISE

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 26, 2024

Deep Forcing: Training-Free Long Video Generation with Deep Sink and Participative Compression

Recent advances in autoregressive video diffusion have enabled real-time frame streaming, yet existing solutions still suffer from temporal repetition, drift, and motion deceleration. We find that naively applying StreamingLLM-style attention sinks to video diffusion leads to fidelity degradation and motion stagnation. To overcome this, we introduce Deep Forcing, which consists of two training-free mechanisms that address this without any fine-tuning. Specifically, 1) Deep Sink dedicates half of the sliding window to persistent sink tokens and re-aligns their temporal RoPE phase to the current timeline, stabilizing global context during long rollouts. 2) Participative Compression performs importance-aware KV cache pruning that preserves only tokens actively participating in recent attention while safely discarding redundant and degraded history, minimizing error accumulation under out-of-distribution length generation. Together, these components enable over 12x extrapolation (e.g. 5s-trained to 60s+ generation) with better imaging quality than LongLive, better aesthetic quality than RollingForcing, almost maintaining overall consistency, and substantial gains in dynamic degree, all while maintaining real-time generation. Our results demonstrate that training-free KV-cache management can match or exceed training-based approaches for autoregressively streaming long-video generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 4, 2025 2

Short-Form Video Recommendations with Multimodal Embeddings: Addressing Cold-Start and Bias Challenges

In recent years, social media users have spent significant amounts of time on short-form video platforms. As a result, established platforms in other domains, such as e-commerce, have begun introducing short-form video content to engage users and increase their time spent on the platform. The success of these experiences is due not only to the content itself but also to a unique UI innovation: instead of offering users a list of choices to click, platforms actively recommend content for users to watch one at a time. This creates new challenges for recommender systems, especially when launching a new video experience. Beyond the limited interaction data, immersive feed experiences introduce stronger position bias due to the UI and duration bias when optimizing for watch-time, as models tend to favor shorter videos. These issues, together with the feedback loop inherent in recommender systems, make it difficult to build effective solutions. In this paper, we highlight the challenges faced when introducing a new short-form video experience and present our experience showing that, even with sufficient video interaction data, it can be more beneficial to leverage a video retrieval system using a fine-tuned multimodal vision-language model to overcome these challenges. This approach demonstrated greater effectiveness compared to conventional supervised learning methods in online experiments conducted on our e-commerce platform.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 25, 2025

TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos?

Recently, there is a surge in interest surrounding video large language models (Video LLMs). However, existing benchmarks fail to provide a comprehensive feedback on the temporal perception ability of Video LLMs. On the one hand, most of them are unable to distinguish between different temporal aspects (e.g., speed, direction) and thus cannot reflect the nuanced performance on these specific aspects. On the other hand, they are limited in the diversity of task formats (e.g., only multi-choice QA), which hinders the understanding of how temporal perception performance may vary across different types of tasks. Motivated by these two problems, we propose the TempCompass benchmark, which introduces a diversity of temporal aspects and task formats. To collect high-quality test data, we devise two novel strategies: (1) In video collection, we construct conflicting videos that share the same static content but differ in a specific temporal aspect, which prevents Video LLMs from leveraging single-frame bias or language priors. (2) To collect the task instructions, we propose a paradigm where humans first annotate meta-information for a video and then an LLM generates the instruction. We also design an LLM-based approach to automatically and accurately evaluate the responses from Video LLMs. Based on TempCompass, we comprehensively evaluate 8 state-of-the-art (SOTA) Video LLMs and 3 Image LLMs, and reveal the discerning fact that these models exhibit notably poor temporal perception ability. The data and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/llyx97/TempCompass.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 1, 2024

Accelerating Streaming Video Large Language Models via Hierarchical Token Compression

Streaming Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various video understanding tasks, but they face significant challenges in real-time deployment due to the high computational cost of processing dense visual tokens from continuous video streams. In streaming video scenarios, the primary bottleneck lies in the Vision Transformer (ViT) encoding stage, where redundant processing of temporally similar frames leads to inefficiency. Additionally, inflated token sequences during LLM pre-filling further exacerbate latency and memory overhead. To address these challenges, we propose Streaming Token Compression (STC), a plug-and-play hierarchical framework that seamlessly integrates into existing streaming VideoLLMs, optimizing both ViT encoding and LLM pre-filling stages to accelerate processing. STC introduces two token-level accelerators: STC-Cacher, which reduces ViT encoding overhead by caching and reusing features from temporally similar frames, and STC-Pruner, which compresses the visual token sequence before it enters the LLM, preserving only the most salient tokens based on both spatial and temporal relevance. Extensive experiments on four baseline streaming VideoLLMs across five benchmarks demonstrate that STC outperforms other compression methods. Notably, STC retains up to 99\% of accuracy on the ReKV framework while reducing ViT encoding latency and LLM pre-filling latency by 24.5\% and 45.3\%.

VideoSeeker: Incentivizing Instance-level Video Understanding via Native Agentic Tool Invocation

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown significant progress in video understanding, yet they face substantial challenges in tasks requiring precise spatiotemporal localization at the instance level. Existing methods primarily rely on text prompts for human-model interaction, but these prompts struggle to provide precise spatial and temporal references, resulting in poor user experience. Furthermore, current approaches typically decouple visual perception from language reasoning, centering reasoning around language rather than visual content, which limits the model's ability to proactively perceive fine-grained visual evidence. To address these challenges, we propose VideoSeeker, a novel paradigm for instance-level video understanding through visual prompts. VideoSeeker seamlessly integrates agentic reasoning with instance-level video understanding tasks, enabling the model to proactively perceive and retrieve relevant video segments on demand. We construct a four-stage fully automated data synthesis pipeline to efficiently generate large-scale, high-quality instance-level video data. We internalize tool-calling and proactive perception capabilities into the model via cold-start supervision and RL training, building a powerful video understanding model. Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves an average improvement of +13.7% over baselines on instance-level video understanding tasks, surpassing powerful closed-source models such as GPT-4o and Gemini-2.5-Pro, while also showing effective transferability on general video understanding benchmarks. The relevant datasets and code will be released publicly.

  • 14 authors
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May 14 2