Paper

Paper: StreamingTOM: Streaming Token Compression for Efficient Video Understanding Code: YIGE24/StreamingTOM Background Streaming video understanding has two constraints that offline video understanding does not really need to respect: causality: the model cannot use future frames to decide how to compress current frames; accumulation: tokens and KV cache keep growing as the video stream becomes longer. Most recent training-free streaming methods mainly work on the post-LLM KV cache: ReKV stores historical KV blocks and retrieves relevant ones at question time; StreamKV improves the segmentation / compression / retrieval pipeline; InfiniPot-V and StreamMem keep a bounded KV memory with query-agnostic compression; LiveVLM combines query-agnostic KV compression with query-time retrieval. These methods are useful, but they still have one important blind spot: ...

Paper: LiveVLM: Efficient Online Video Understanding via Streaming-Oriented KV Cache and Retrieval Code: sjtu-zhao-lab/LiveVLM Background Online video understanding is harder than offline long-video QA. In the offline setting, the model usually receives a video and a question together. It can then sample, compress, or retrieve content with the query already known. In the online setting, the model has two separate phases: encoding phase: video frames arrive continuously before any question appears; response phase: when a user asks a question, the model should answer quickly from the already processed stream. This creates three constraints at the same time: ...

Paper: StreamMem: Query-Agnostic KV Cache Memory for Streaming Video Understanding Background Streaming video understanding is hard because the model has to process frames as they arrive, without knowing: how long the video will be; what future user questions will ask; which past details will become important later. For long videos, the visual tokens and their KV cache keep growing over time. Even if a long-context MLLM can technically accept many tokens, storing and attending to all historical KV entries is still expensive. ...

Paper: Recurrent Attention-based Token Selection for Efficient Streaming Video-LLMs Code: vdorovatas/rLiVS Background Streaming video understanding is hard because the model must process incoming frames online, keep useful past information, and still answer questions with low latency. The brute-force solution is to put as many frames as possible into the context window, but this quickly becomes too expensive for long videos. Recent papers handle this in different ways: ReKV keeps rich visual memory in the form of KV cache and retrieves it later, but memory and latency are still significant. Goldfish stores only captions for each short clip, which is cheap, but clip-to-clip continuity can be weak. rLiVS tries to sit between these two directions: ...

Paper: InfiniPot-V: Memory-Constrained KV Cache Compression for Streaming Video Understanding Code: aiha-lab/InfiniPot-V Background Streaming video understanding is more constrained than offline long-video understanding. In offline settings, the model can see the whole video first, maybe even the user query first, and then decide how to compress tokens or KV cache. But in streaming settings: frames arrive continuously; future queries are unknown; memory is fixed; KV cache still grows roughly linearly with time. This is exactly the part that makes many existing KV compression methods awkward for real streaming scenarios. ...

Paper: StreamKV: Streaming Video Question-Answering with Segment-based KV Cache Retrieval and Compression Code: sou1p0wer/StreamKV Background Streaming video question-answering (StreamingVQA) requires a model to continuously process incoming video, preserve useful historical context, and answer questions online with low latency. ReKV showed that video QA can be reformulated as retrieve relevant KV caches first, then answer with the retrieved KV. But it still has several weaknesses: It uses uniform segmentation, which may cut through semantic boundaries. It keeps essentially the whole historical visual context, so memory usage is still large. Its retrieval strategy is not flexible enough, especially when the useful information is distributed differently across layers. Core Idea StreamKV extends the ReKV line in two directions at the same time: ...

Paper: Streaming Video Question-Answering with In-context Video KV-Cache Retrieval Code: Becomebright/ReKV Background Consider the problem of streaming video question-answering (StreamingVQA), it presents three challenges: Efficient Video Encoding: we need to efficiently process incoming frames without access to future frames or frequent revisiting of distant past frames. Video Context Preservation: models must preserve relevant information from earlier frames. Real-Time Response: models must provide accurate answers with minimum delay. Core Idea The attention calculation makes it possible to decouple video encoding from question answering. So we can pre-produce KV and reuse KV in QA. ...