When to Retrieve, When to Stay: Uncertainty-Aware Temporal Evidence Allocation for Streaming Video-LLMs

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. Existing methods address this by adding memory banks, retrieval modules, or visual token compression to preserve long-range history. However, strong recent-window baselines show that indiscriminate history injection can dilute current-scene perception, suggesting that the key challenge is not whether to use memory, but how to allocate it selectively. We formulate this as budgeted online latent evidence allocation and propose \textbf{SelectStream}, a selective latent-memory framework that keeps the current observation directly visible to a frozen VLM while exposing historical information only through a compact, query-conditioned evidence budget. Three coordinated mechanisms govern when to write, what to preserve, and how to retrieve: surprise-driven adaptive windowing, priority-preserving consolidation, and query-conditioned graph reasoning over a fixed-capacity latent memory graph. Retrieved evidence is calibrated and injected as latent tokens for answer generation, without replaying frames or growing the context with stream length. Experimental results show that SelectStream achieves strong online streaming performance and preserves general video understanding, reaching 82.67% on StreamingBench, 67.03% on OVO-Bench, and 74.4% average accuracy on offline video benchmarks, while outperforming strong recent-window baselines and prior streaming memory methods.

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.

Streaming video understanding requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to process continuous visual inputs and respond to user queries under strict causality and bounded memory. Existing approaches typically compress historical observations into an external memory bank and retrieve query-relevant evidence as additional visual context. Though effective, this store-and-retrieve paradigm keeps historical evidence as external visual context, preventing it from being internalized into a compact, evolving latent memory that can continuously guide streaming reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce LatentStream, a progressive latent working memory framework that shifts streaming memory from store-and-retrieve to retrieve-and-internalize. Specifically, LatentStream comprises three coordinated components. First, Query-agnostic Hierarchical Streaming Memory organizes visual history into short-, mid-, and long-term levels under a fixed memory budget through Jenks-guided adaptive consolidation. Once a query arrives, Hierarchical Latent Memory Evolution equips groups of latent memory tokens with progressively expanding memory receptive fields, enabling them to iteratively retrieve historical evidence from their corresponding scopes and internalize it into a compact, fixed-length latent memory. Finally, Progressive Confidence-guided Latent Memory Optimization constructs a hierarchical progression reward from group-wise predictive entropy and jointly refines the latent memory tokens and retrieved evidence, encouraging increasingly confident streaming reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LatentStream achieves new state-of-the-art results on existing online and offline video benchmarks.