StreamFlow: Dynamic Memory Flows for Streaming Video Understanding

arXiv:2608.10949v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Streaming video understanding requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to preserve relevant evidence from continuously evolving streams under strict causality and bounded memory. Yet existing paradigms remain limited: model-based methods require intrusive backbone updates, while memory-based methods expend substantial visual-encoding computation on temporally redundant content and rely on rigid access to visual history. To address these limitations, we introduce StreamFlow, an efficient visual memory framework that enables dynamic, on-demand access to historical visual information. StreamFlow combines a lightweight, dynamics-aware mid-term memory that filters temporal redundancy before visual encoding with a latent long-term memory that consolidates historical video content into visual latents accessible to subsequent reasoning. During generation, an attention-guided retrieval mechanism injects relevant visual latents when the model's reliance on visual evidence weakens. StreamFlow achieves state-of-the-art streaming video understanding performance, reaching 67.73% overall accuracy on StreamingBench, while also delivering strong performance on offline long-video benchmarks. Relative to the vanilla setting, it improves the visual attention score (VAS) by 59.1% while reducing end-to-end latency and peak memory by 50.4% and 21.1%, respectively, enabling more visually grounded and efficient reasoning.

Related

• Towards a Dynamic and Fixed-budget Memory Bank for Efficient Streaming Video Understanding
• From Verbatim to Gist: Distilling Pyramidal Multimodal Memory via Semantic Information Bottleneck for Long-Horizon Video Agents
• RetentiveKV: State-Space Memory for Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal KV Cache Eviction

Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-08-12