SPARE is a framework for streaming video understanding that adaptively retrieves historical evidence when recent observations are insufficient to answer a question. It uses a lightweight gate to decide when to fetch relevant past clips via a multimodal embedding model, and trains the system with LoRA instruction tuning to jointly use recent and retrieved context while abstaining when evidence is lacking. By sharing a visual encoder between understanding and retrieval branches and aligning features with linear adapters, SPARE achieves state‑of‑the‑art accuracy on OVO‑Bench and StreamingBench, outperforming Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct by over 20 percentage points on OVO‑Bench and 14 on StreamingBench.
By Senbin Xu, Zijun Zhang, Xinhua Wu, Li He, Jubo Feng, Li Qiao, Zhen Gao, Yan Zhang, Jixiang Luo, Rongrong Ji
arXiv:2606. 16353v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Streaming video understanding models must answer queries at any moment during an ongoing stream, using only what they have observed so far and under fixed memory and computation budgets.
By Haonan Ge, Yiwei Wang, Hang Wu, Yujun Cai
arXiv:2609.37345v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Streaming video understanding requires Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) to reason over continuous visual streams under causal constraints. As t...
By Xiang Hu, Jiazuo Yu, Lu Zhang, Yunzhi Zhuge, Huchuan Lu
ShallowStream is a framework for streaming video understanding that uses the shallow layers of a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to encode frames and build a lightweight index. During streaming, it maintains an always‑on index via the KV cache of shallow layers, and at query time it scores context frames using shallow‑layer attention and selects diverse evidence for answering. The approach matches the performance of leading streaming methods while cutting per‑frame prefill latency and 10‑second end‑to‑end latency by up to 52.1× and 11.9×, respectively.
By Jitai Hao, Ke Yang, Qiang Huang, Jun Yu
arXiv:2609.16722v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Scaling Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to long-form video understanding is bottlenecked by the explosion of visual tokens, which saturates co...
By Haoyu Guo, Yuan Feng, Junlin Lv, Mingjun Xiao, S Kevin Zhou, Xike Xie
arXiv:2609.37042v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) have achieved strong video understanding capabilities but incur substantial inference overhead due to the lar...
By Shuo Yang, Changbai Li, Rui Tang, Xinyu Zhao, Linlin Yang, Baochang Zhang
Scaling Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to long-form video understanding is bottlenecked by the explosion of visual tokens, which saturates context windows and incurs prohibitive costs. Curre...
Recent advancements in MLLM-based long-form video understanding have mitigated inference-time computational cost and limited context lengths by selecting query-relevant frames. However, existing approaches predominantly rely on external proxy scorers and rigid heuristic rules, inevitably suffering from misalignment with the target MLLM's intrinsic evidence and failing to accommodate the non-uniform spatiotemporal information density.
arXiv:2607. 24794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate superior generalization in fundamental video tasks, restricted context windows limit their long video understanding.
By Linghao Meng, Qiankun Li, Junyuan Mao, Pujin Liao, Zhicheng He, Enbo Zhang, Kun Wang, Yang Liu, Huazhu Fu, Yueming Jin
The paper introduces OTFS, a principled optimal transport framework for selecting frames in long-video understanding. It formulates frame selection as a structured evidence-allocation problem, using a semi‑unbalanced entropic optimal transport objective and an efficient OTFS‑Sinkhorn solver, followed by a dynamic‑programming extraction step. Experiments on three benchmarks show OTFS consistently outperforms strong training‑free baselines.
By Ziwei Zhao, Yuhang Liu
arXiv:2607. 25266v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled long-form video understanding at a scale that was not previously possible.
By Ghazal Kaviani, Ghassan AlRegib
The paper introduces FrameBlend, a plug‑and‑play technique for streaming video understanding that selectively recomputes key‑value (KV) caches at query time. By re‑prefilling only query‑relevant video tokens, FrameBlend allows shorter attention windows during idle prefill, cutting prefill cost while boosting accuracy. Experiments on three SVU frameworks and five benchmarks show up to 3.9‑point accuracy gains and significant reductions in FLOPs and processing time.
By Junhyeok Lee, Sangyoon Lee, Jaeho Lee