From ReKV to Retrieval-Behavior Preservation: What Should a Streaming VLM Remember?

Series guide. This article is the bounded-memory thematic survey. Start with the development-history hub for the six-path map, read the ReKV note for the exact-archive baseline, and use the pipeline survey for the stage-by-stage architecture. A streaming Video-LMM has to make decisions before it knows which detail a future user will care about. ReKV avoids write-time eviction or compression by storing every generated visual KV block, then retrieves a small subset after the question is known. This does not recover unsampled pixels or information absent from those model states. Fixed-state methods make the opposite trade: they evict, merge, or summarize history during the stream so that memory no longer grows with video duration. ...

September 3, 2026 · 17 min

Streaming Video-LMM Is Not One SOTA Line: Six Development Paths from 2023 to 2026

Series guide. This is the development-history hub for my streaming Video-LMM notes. For a stage-by-stage systems view, see the pipeline survey. For dataset and protocol details, see the benchmark index. The complete reading map is at the end of this article. Calling a model streaming no longer identifies one technical problem. One paper may process a causal video prefix but retain every historical KV block. Another may keep a fixed cache but permanently forget old evidence. A proactive assistant may know the user’s request before the stream begins, while a delayed question-answering system must decide what to preserve before any question is known. A benchmark may measure the age of remembered evidence without measuring whether the implementation can keep up with a live camera. ...

September 2, 2026 · Updated September 3, 2026 · 25 min

Memento

Paper: OpenReview PDF: Memento: Toward an All-Day Proactive Assistant for Ultra-Long Streaming Video Supplement: OpenReview Supplementary Material Base implementation: showlab/videollm-online Core Idea Memento turns a streaming Video-LLM into a persistent visual monitor. A user registers a request such as tell me every time I hold a phone, and the model keeps observing the stream, updating its history, and deciding at every frame whether to remain silent or respond. The method can be summarized as: ...

July 25, 2026 · ICLR 2026 · 10 min

OASIS

Paper: OASIS: On-Demand Hierarchical Event Memory for Streaming Video Reasoning PDF: CVPR 2026 Open Access Code: Solus-sano/OASIS Core Idea OASIS is a training-free external memory and agentic RAG system for streaming video. It organizes the past into an online event hierarchy, reasons from a small working context by default, and retrieves historical keyframes only when the MLLM decides that more evidence is needed. The method can be summarized as: short/medium visual working memory + an online tree of event summaries and keyframes + prompt-based history routing + planned-query retrieval. ...

July 24, 2026 · CVPR 2026 · 12 min

StreamChat

Paper: Streaming Video Understanding and Multi-round Interaction with Memory-enhanced Knowledge Code: hmxiong/StreamChat Background Most Video-LLMs are still awkward in a real streaming setting. Offline video QA usually assumes: the whole video is already available; the question is known before inference; the interaction is single-turn. But a streaming assistant has a different problem: video frames keep arriving; the user may ask questions at arbitrary timestamps; the system should remember previous conversation turns; the answer should come back with low latency. This is close to the motivation of ReKV, Flash-VStream, LiveVLM, and rLiVS, but StreamChat chooses a different abstraction. ...

May 2, 2026 · Updated June 8, 2026 · ICLR 2025 · 12 min

StreamMem

Paper: StreamMem: Query-Agnostic KV Cache Memory for Streaming Video Understanding Project: StreamMem Series guide. For how proxy-guided retention fits between exact archives and summary-state memory, see the bounded-memory survey. The development-history hub places this method in the complete series. 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. ...

April 24, 2026 · Updated September 3, 2026 · CVPR 2026 VidLLMs Workshop · 10 min