Streaming Inference
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Existing streaming vision-language models (VLMs) continuously perceive and reason over visual streams, but their computational pathways remain fixed throughout inference. Consequently, they cannot adapt computation to evolving scene dynamics, where different future events demand different levels and forms of perception. We show that streaming VLMs inherently possess the ability to anticipate the immediate future, and leverage this capability to dynamically configure future computation in a training-free manner. Realizing such anticipatory computation, however, is very challenging: future anticipation must be sufficiently reliable to guide computation, planning must run concurrently with streaming inference, and online reconfiguration must incur negligible overhead. To address these challenges, we introduce FORESIGHT, a dual-stream architecture comprising two Siamese LLMs with shared weights, input encoders, and KV cache. The first LLM continuously processes incoming tokens, while the second runs ahead of the stream to anticipate future context, plan future computation, and generate task responses without interrupting streaming inference. Each plan decides when to reason next, what to check then, and how densely to sample, keeping transient evidence separate from persistent control. The resulting computation plan is executed online through an efficient reconfiguration protocol with schemaguided decoding and lightweight diff-based updates, enabling dynamic adaptation with low overhead. With a frozen Qwen3-VL-8B backbone, FORESIGHT achieves 23.0 mean joint F1 on OmniPro Online evaluation beating strongest trained baseline by 9.5%, while improving the backbone by 6.7 on StreamingBench and 15.4 on OVO-Bench, with the largest gain of 18.7 when evidence arrives later in the video stream. Our source code will be made publicly available.
OneStreamer: Unifying Perception, Memory, and Proactive Response in Streaming Video Interaction
Streaming video LLMs must retain evidence before its relevance to future tasks is known and respond when sufficient evidence becomes available. The challenge is to form reusable factual memory without compromising real-time perception. We introduce OneStreamer, which jointly learns query-independent evidence recording and task response through a shared proactive generation process. Its Proactive Hierarchical Caption Memory (PHCM) produces time-grounded local-detail captions and summaries of completed events. Streaming caption targets supervise the interpretation of observed video prefixes during training. At inference, model-generated records complement a recent visual window, providing reusable factual context without revisiting historical visual features. Proactive State Transition Learning (PSTL) reduces the dominance of repeated waiting states by preserving supervision at all output anchors and selecting representative state-change and state-persistence tokens. We further develop a streaming data synthesis pipeline that aligns output content and timing with available evidence. Combining the resulting streaming captions and QA with cleaned open-source data yields OneStreamer-1M, a broad-coverage streaming video interaction dataset with over one million records spanning diverse tasks. Our 4B model achieves the best results among the compared methods across all eight evaluated streaming video understanding benchmarks. Ablations show that retaining generated captions improves historical QA without degrading real-time perception. PSTL also outperforms dense state supervision while supervising only 27.5% of annotated state tokens. Together, these results support proactive generation as a shared learning interface connecting perception, memory formation, and timely response in streaming video interaction.
FlashBack: Knowing When to Remember in Streaming Vision-Language Models
Streaming vision-language models must process continuously growing video streams under a bounded compute budget, creating a persistent tension between real-time perception and long-term memory. Retrieving historical information provides a natural remedy, yet historical recall is not uniformly beneficial: unnecessary history may introduce irrelevant context into current reasoning and interfere with native real-time perception. Effective streaming memory should therefore address not only what to remember, but also when and how to access it. To this end, we introduce FlashBack, a training-free framework for selective, multi-level memory in streaming vision-language models. Before retrieving history, FlashBack draws on the semantic understanding of the frozen streaming VLM to infer whether a query calls for historical evidence. This assessment determines whether inference remains on the Native trajectory or invokes an isolated Recall trajectory. The Recall trajectory combines recent context with retrieved long-term memory through a query-local Side-KV pathway, preserving local temporal continuity without modifying the persistent Native state. We instantiate FlashBack on StreamingVLM and Mage-VL-4B and evaluate it on OVO-Bench and StreamingBench. The results show improvements on several long-horizon and memory-dependent tasks while largely preserving real-time perception, with performance competitive with strong training-based streaming methods despite requiring no additional training. Our code will be announced later.
StreamDecisionBench: Evaluating Decisions in Force on Evolving Language Streams
Language models increasingly make real-time decisions in applications that apply the latest answer until a newer one arrives. A late answer can prolong an outdated decision, such as a call recorder still running while a customer reads out card details, an error offline accuracy misses. We make three contributions. First, we release StreamDecisionBench (SDB), a dataset of eight streaming scenarios in four application families, with executable reference decisions derived from public rules. Second, we propose an evaluation protocol and a metric, in-force accuracy: the share of time the applied decision is correct across update intervals of 0.5-8 s. It reflects accuracy and latency jointly, attributing each error to judgment, latency or both. Third, we evaluate fifteen single-model settings, and this attribution separates speed-limited from judgment-limited models: slower, more accurate models lose 42-47% of the time to outdated answers, a fast model 35% to wrong ones. We therefore test hybrids in which a slow model corrects a fast one; with the right pairing and configuration, a hybrid outperforms every single model. However, even the best evaluated system keeps a correct decision in force only about two-thirds of the time, leaving a substantial gap for real-time use.
MemEvo: Automatic Discovery of Streaming Video Memory Mechanisms
Query-agnostic streaming video understanding requires vision-language models to continuously compress an indefinitely growing visual stream into a bounded memory before future queries are known. The performance depends critically on the memory mechanism--what observations to preserve, how to represent and consolidate them, and what information to retrieve when a query eventually arrives. Rather than designing a single memory architecture by hand, we formulate memory design as a search problem over executable memory programs. We introduce a lightweight domain-specific language that expresses memory mechanisms through structured primitives for representation, admission, retention, consolidation, budgeting, and retrieval, while enforcing causal and bounded-memory constraints. Although structured, the derived program space remains large and contains heterogeneous, conditionally dependent design choices whose effects can only be assessed via downstream execution. We therefore propose MemEvo, an LLM-driven auto-research framework that uses pretrained LLM as a semantics-aware proposal model to iteratively generate and refine candidate memory programs based on accumulated experimental feedback. At runtime, a deterministic evaluation pipeline validates and evaluates each candidate, while the underlying vision-language model remains frozen throughout discovery. We finally produce a training-free, bounded-memory mechanism. Extensive experiments on StreamingBench and OVO-Bench demonstrate strong streaming video understanding performance together with substantial context and inference efficiency.
AVTR-1: Open Stack for Real-Time Interactive Avatars
Talking-head and dyadic models now achieve real-time inference, yet fast motion generation alone does not produce an interactive conversation. A live system must synchronize the model's output with speech from an external voice agent, schedule video frames for playback, and handle interruptions. We introduce AVTR-1, an open stack for real-time interactive avatar conversations, built around a compact 153M-parameter autoregressive flow-matching motion generator conditioned on both participants' audio. We adapt its audio encoder for streaming through self-distillation. The stack turns the model's chunk-based generation into a continuous, synchronized audio-video stream driven by an external voice agent, and we analytically derive its contribution to the user-facing latencies and validate the resulting bounds with two commercial voice agents. Further experiments demonstrate that AVTR-1 leads the compared dyadic systems on all reported visual-quality metrics and most conventional listening-motion metrics while remaining competitive in lip synchronization. Its inference runtime operates in real time on data-center and consumer GPUs. However, conventional listening metrics do not establish whether the paired speaker's speech contributes to generated motion. We therefore introduce the Reference-Based Directed Granger Gain (R-DGG), which measures the additional predictive information carried by speaker speech after accounting for listener history and speaker motion. R-DGG finds statistically supported predictive dependence for recorded listeners and all evaluated dyadic systems, but not for talking-head generators without paired audio or mismatched speaker-listener pairs. We release the model weights, renderer, and serving backend under component-specific licenses.
Intelligence Under Time Constraints: Rethinking Test-Time Compute
Intelligence under time constraints requires deciding not only how much to compute, but when computation is worth starting. We study this problem in streaming interactions, where evidence arrives incrementally and may be revised. Early computation has more time to finish but rests on incomplete evidence; waiting improves information while shrinking computational slack. We call this the information-slack dilemma. We take the evidence-dependent computational job as the unit of analysis: when to start it, what supports its result, and when that result can be committed. Advance computation is valuable only insofar as its benefits survive the costs of verification, invalidation, and recovery. This applies to grounded incremental processing and reusable preparation as well as future-dependent speculation. We propose a research agenda on computation under evolving evidence, prioritizing selective recovery under controlled evidence revisions. Evaluation should separate earlier-execution effects, deployment value against a full-input alternative, and the added value of predictive policies, while accounting for shared-resource costs. The objective is not maximal advance computation, but more trustworthy, on-time responses within a declared resource envelope.
X2Streaming-ASR: wait when uncertain, emit when ready for streaming ASR
Streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) for real-time voice agents and full-duplex dialogue must provide accurate partial transcripts with low commit latency. Existing systems commonly use a fixed chunk size, look-ahead, or target delay, or encourage emissions near estimated acoustic boundaries. These approaches do not directly optimize how much additional context to use at each output position under a single-pass, hard-commit constraint. We propose X2Streaming-ASR, which decomposes streaming recognition into when to commit and what to commit. Its three-stage training procedure first establishes streaming recognition ability, then warm-starts the commit policy with automatically probed trajectories, and finally refines the policy using character-level, segment-assigned group-relative rewards for recognition accuracy and latency. Across ten Chinese and English test sets, X2Streaming-ASR attains the lowest mean commit latency relative to forced-aligned endpoints, 32--109ms on Chinese characters and 12--85ms on English words, while recognition accuracy remains comparable to existing systems.Code is available at https://github.com/X-Square-Robot/X2Streaming-ASR.
Streaming Hierarchical Inference with Tabular Foundation Models
Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) have recently demonstrated strong predictive performance through in-context learning, but their deployment in high-throughput data streams remains challenging due to communication overhead and latency. We propose HINT, a hierarchical inference framework that combines edge-based retrieval with cloud-based TFM inference. A graph-based approximate nearest neighbor memory maintained over a sliding window provides local predictions and uncertainty estimates, allowing confident samples to be processed locally while uncertain instances are selectively offloaded, together with their retrieved context, to a cloud-hosted TFM. The framework exposes an offloading threshold and a neighborhood retrieval policy that can be varied to balance predictive performance and communication cost. Experiments show HINT consistently identifies favorable trade-offs.
LeanStream: A Speculate-and-Refine Streaming Framework for Efficient on-Device LLM Inference
On-device LLM inference is attractive for privacy and responsiveness, but remains challenging on mobile and embedded devices because model weights far exceed available DRAM. Prior systems exploit activation sparsity and offload weights to SSD or flash storage, but face a fundamental systems trade-off: accurate sparse execution decisions require the latest context, whereas efficient computation-I/O overlap requires early prediction. As a result, existing designs either serialize execution or incur redundant weight fetches, extra computation, and large cache overheads. We present LeanStream, a streaming speculate-and-refine framework for efficient on-device LLM inference. LeanStream progressively refines computation, loading, and cache-retention priorities using partial GPU results, enabling fine-grained overlap between GPU execution and storage I/O. We implement LeanStream on both mobile and embedded platforms. Compared with prior on-device LLM inference systems, LeanStream reduces memory usage by 4.8 to 7.5 at the best throughput achieved by prior work, while further improving token generation throughput by 1.6 to 2.1.
StreamScout: Learning When to Look Deeper for Streaming Video Understanding
Streaming video understanding requires answering questions that arrive at arbitrary moments over an unbounded video stream. Existing systems primarily focus on what to retain in a bounded memory, yet access that memory using the same fixed-cost procedure for every query, despite substantial variation in the evidence required. We argue that deciding how deeply to access memory for each query is as important as deciding what the memory should store. To this end, we introduce StreamScout, an adaptive inference framework that maintains only a lightweight textual timeline in context as the stream unfolds. At query time, StreamScout progressively augments the timeline with up to three increasingly informative visual views: a glance at recent frames, a uniform look-back over the past stream, and query-salient retrieval. At each stage, the model answers immediately if the available evidence is sufficient; otherwise, it escalates to the next view. To improve this stop-or-escalate policy, we probe the cascade on an auxiliary set and distill the model's empirical competence boundary into supervision for a lightweight LoRA adaptation, yielding StreamScout-S. We further refine the policy through reinforcement learning, allowing the model to explore stopping behaviors beyond imitation of the distilled decisions, yielding StreamScout-R. Across three backbones and three streaming benchmarks, StreamScout and its variants consistently outperform prior streaming methods while substantially reducing inference cost and token consumption; on OVO-Bench, for instance, StreamScout-S improves Qwen3-VL-8B by 14.65 points while using 59% fewer tokens than uniform sampling and answering in 1.04 s on average.
StreamOPD: A Post-Training Recipe with Spatio-Temporal Cue Gating for Streaming Video Understanding
Streaming video understanding demands direct responses from the causally observed prefix of an unfolding video. Existing systems add inference-time memory, retrieval, and compression, yet a training-free sliding-window baseline already matches them. We therefore fix a memory-free recent-window protocol and ask how far post-training alone can go. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards fits this regime poorly, encouraging long ``think-then-answer'' generations, while on-policy distillation (OPD) supplies dense token-level teacher supervision on student trajectories but is stable only when both models train in thinking mode. These observations lead to StreamOPD, a recipe combining verifiable streaming-video data, thinking-mode OPD, and instruct-mode deployment. It raises StreamingBench from to ---within points of the 9B teacher---and improves OVO-Bench excluding its hallucination-detection subtask (HLD) by points under unchanged inference. As a teacher-privilege extension, Spatio-Temporal CueGate (ST-CueGate) aggregates cue-versus-no-cue teacher likelihood ratios into a group-relative response score that reweights OPD. It reaches on OVO-Bench (excluding HLD) and on Video-MME, and is the only variant that stays above the base model on all four benchmarks. Replacing the teacher with a frozen copy of the student's initial policy---on-policy self-distillation---retains most of these gains and lifts HLD to , above both the untrained student and the 9B teacher, so abstention loss is not intrinsic to the recipe. We provide a transparent and reproducible reference for open-source streaming-video research.
StreamTTT: Reconciling Real-Time Perception and Long-Term Memory in Streaming VLMs
Humans effortlessly perceive the present while remembering the past, yet streaming VLMs often trade off real-time perception against long-term memory. Prior work shows that shortening the context can sharpen current-scene perception at the expense of long-range recall. To reconcile these abilities, we introduce StreamTTT, which writes long-range history into online-updated fast weights outside the attention context. This leaves a short sliding key-value cache dedicated to recent evidence, mitigating attention dilution. We train StreamTTT jointly on offline long-video QA and a newly constructed real-time QA corpus. On OVO-Bench, under each model's reported input protocol, StreamTTT-4B outperforms the same-scale SimpleStream-4B by 0.6 points in real-time perception and 5.3 points in backward tracing. It also surpasses the larger SimpleStream-8B by 0.73 points on StreamingBench's Real-Time Visual Understanding (RTVU) subset. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zeyun-zhong/StreamTTT.
CascadeLUT: Information-Ordered Streaming Inference for Bandwidth-Constrained FPGAs
Mapping neural networks to FPGAs enables low-latency, energy-efficient inference, particularly for lookup table (LUT)-based models that eliminate multipliers and map directly to reconfigurable fabric. While prior work achieves high compute efficiency, it typically assumes full-sample availability, causing pipeline stalls in bandwidth-limited streaming scenarios. Here, the bottleneck shifts from computation to data movement, as large input transfers limit throughput and energy efficiency. We present CascadeLUT, an information-structured inference framework organized around bandwidth constraints. Instead of buffering the full input, features are partitioned into ordered subsets and predictions are progressively refined as subsets arrive. The cascade statically controls which layers consume incoming features, enabling deterministic streaming inference without runtime branching. By co-designing feature scheduling with hardware dataflow, CascadeLUT reduces data movement while maintaining accuracy. Across datasets, it achieves 4.0 to 12.5 times lower latency, 3.0 to 5.0 times higher throughput and up to 13.8 times lower energy/sample than prior LUT baselines, using 1.2 to 4.4 times the LUTs of the smallest DWN baseline per task. We also demonstrate on-device input quantization integrated with LUT-based inference and present end-to-end FPGA results on real-world workloads, with 5 times reductions in quantization overhead.
Video = World + Event Stream
We present Wan-Streamer v0.3, which reframes our native-streaming interaction model under a single organizing view: a video is a world plus an event stream. The world is the persistent context in which a video unfolds, including the environment, scene, subjects, ambient acoustic conditions, voice characteristics, and other relatively stable conditions. The event stream is everything that changes over time within that world, including scene or environmental changes, subject behavior, speech, and other sounds. This yields a general-purpose pretraining task over large amounts of real video: given a world and incoming input, predict how the world moves, changes, and responds in real time. The resulting competence can be specialized to a broad family of real-time downstream tasks. We instantiate it on real-time full-duplex audio-visual interaction, where the event stream is the agent's speech together with free-form behavior. Functionally, the model's multimodal understanding process is vision-language-action-like: it maps multimodal user input to language-form speech and behavior actions. Wan-Streamer v0.3 preserves the v0.2 operating point: 640x368 video at 25 FPS, a 160 ms streaming unit, approximately 200 ms model-side response latency, and approximately 550 ms total interaction latency under a 350 ms bidirectional network budget.
FlashDecoder: Real-Time Latent-to-Pixel Streaming Decoder with Transformers
Real-time video generation demands fast decoding as much as fast denoising, yet current latent video diffusion models rely on 3D convolutional decoders that are slow and memory-intensive at high resolutions or for long video. We introduce FlashDecoder, a fast, memory-efficient pure-Transformer video decoder that decodes latents to pixels frame by frame. At each step, the current frame attends only to a fixed-size window of past frames through a rolling KV cache. The fixed temporal window keeps decoding fast and memory bounded regardless of video length, enabling constant-latency streaming. Because frames are processed sequentially, temporal causality is enforced without explicit attention masks, enabling training at resolutions up to 1080p and matching the reconstruction quality of convolutional decoders. On the Wan2.1 and Wan2.2 latent spaces, FlashDecoder matches each convolutional decoder in reconstruction quality (e.g., 41.55dB vs. 41.49dB PSNR at 1080p) while decoding 3.6x-4.7x faster with up to 11x less memory on a single H100 GPU. With architecture-aware inference optimizations, the speedup widens to 12x.
FOLIO: Focused Semantic Memory for Streaming Video Understanding
In online streaming video understanding, a video stream continues to arrive and queries may be issued at any time. Because streaming frames grow without bound, the system must continuously compress and retain information from the observed video prefix while future frames and future queries remain unknown. The core challenge is deciding what information to retain and how to organize the maintained history: as this history grows with the stream, memory cost increases and many redundant visual details are retained, whereas later queries often depend on specific entities, actions, and their temporal changes. To address this challenge, we introduce FOLIO, a training-free focused semantic memory system that records important parts of the stream in higher detail while keeping surrounding context compact. As the stream arrives, FOLIO updates memory at the segment level, guided by a dynamic focus state, combining a short-term visual buffer with a long-term semantic memory organized around observed entities and linked to a visual-evidence cache. At query time, lightweight hybrid retrieval combines direct matching over the structured memory with semantic query expansion. FOLIO achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 82.0/69.1 Perception/Backward accuracy on OVO-Bench with Qwen3-VL-8B and 74.5 overall accuracy on StreamingBench, while substantially reducing the cost of maintaining streaming memory by reserving detailed records for focused entities and storing surrounding context compactly.
Toward Real-Time Sentence-Level Sign Language Translation
Most sign language understanding systems operate at the level of isolated signs, limiting their usefulness in natural communication. We study sentence-level sign language translation (SLT) with the primary goal of real-time deployment rather than proposing a new translation architecture. We fine-tune a SHuBERT-ByT5 translation stack on a uniformly sampled 9,872-example subset of How2Sign, selected because of compute and storage constraints, using QLoRA while keeping SHuBERT frozen. The model obtains a validation BLEU of 16.7 and, on the test split, BLEU 15.9 and BLEURT 44.7. The main contribution is a hardware-aware streaming system: a Raspberry Pi 4B reference client provides camera capture, local text display, and speech output, while compute-intensive perception and translation run on a CPU/GPU backend. The capture protocol remains client-agnostic, so the same backend can serve a browser, phone, or laptop. Chunked ingestion, bounded queues, parallelized perception, temporal reordering, and a sentence-boundary state machine reduce mean post-finalization response latency from 1.873 to 1.354 seconds (27.71%) and P95 latency from 2.919 to 2.130 seconds (27.03%) over the complete 9,872-example working subset.
Wan-Streamer v0.2: Higher Resolution, Same Latency
We present Wan-Streamer v0.2, a latency-preserving upgrade of the native-streaming, end-to-end audio-visual interaction model. v0.2 keeps the v0.1 modeling formulation, but raises the interactive output stream from 192x336 to 640x368 while preserving approximately 200 ms model-side signal-to-signal latency at 25 FPS. The higher-resolution stream supports scene-grounded mid-shot agents whose posture, gaze, hands, nearby objects, and local scene layout remain legible during real-time conversation. To support the larger visual stream without adding user-visible delay, v0.2 keeps the thinker as a single-GPU low-latency path for streaming perception, the short language/state Transformer pass that builds the generation cache, and final decoding. The performer becomes a multi-GPU Ulysses-style context-parallel group for the expensive next-unit latent generation. Each performer rank writes incoming K/V into a pre-sharded local cache. The long high-resolution latent video sequence is split across ranks for denoising and gathered through Ulysses communication, while the much shorter audio latent sequence is generated without sequence sharding. In this split, the thinker's language/state computation reaches the performer only as K/V conditioning, so no separate language sequence has to be communicated inside the performer group. This concentrates additional hardware on visual generation while preserving the compact thinker-performer boundary, keeping total remote interaction latency at approximately 550 ms when a 350 ms bidirectional network budget is included.
ViCoStream: Streaming VideoLLMs Can Run Beyond 100 FPS with Stage-Wise Coordinated Inference
Streaming VideoLLMs must continuously process incoming video while maintaining low query latency, making both video-ingestion throughput and query-time responsiveness critical for real-time deployment. Existing methods largely focus on accelerating individual modules, such as visual encoding, token pruning, or KV-cache compression, but provide limited insight into whether the resulting system can sustain real-time streaming performance. We formulate streaming VideoLLM inference as a coordinated pipeline spanning visual preprocessing, visual encoding, token dropping, and LLM prefilling/decoding. Building on this formulation, we propose ViCoStream (Video Coordinated Streaming), a stage-wise coordinated streaming framework that combines chunk-wise execution, CUDA-stream overlap, visual token control, bounded visual attention, and query-side retrieval to bound per-chunk computation and memory costs. We further provide a systematic study of bottleneck migration, revealing how chunk size, token retention, attention locality, and retrieval scope shape the throughput-accuracy trade-off. Experiments with Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B-Instruct across multiple streaming benchmarks show that ViCoStream achieves 134 FPS video throughput and less than 50 ms TTFT on a single A100 GPU while maintaining accuracy close to full-history baselines.
STREAM: Multi-Tier LLM Inference Middleware with Dual-Channel HPC Token Streaming
Researchers and practitioners working with large language models face a fragmented landscape: local models are free and private but hardware limits the model size and context windows a researcher can use; institutional HPC centers offer powerful GPU resources at no marginal cost and keep data within institutional boundaries, but operate behind firewalls and are designed for batch jobs rather than interactive use; commercial cloud APIs provide frontier-model quality on demand but impose significant cost and data retention policies unsuitable for sensitive research data. No existing system unifies all three. STREAM (Smart Tiered Routing Engine for AI Models) addresses this gap with four contributions: (1) a three-tier routing architecture combining local, HPC, and cloud inference with a local LLM-based complexity judge; (2) a dual-channel HPC streaming architecture that separates the Globus Compute control plane (authentication and job dispatch) from a WebSocket relay data plane (token delivery), enabling sub-second TTFT (0.54 s median, 21.1x over batch mode's 11.40 s) through institutional firewalls without VPN or firewall rule changes, with end-to-end AES-256-GCM encryption ensuring the relay operator cannot read token payloads; (3) tier-aware context summarization that prevents long conversations from forcing simple queries onto expensive tiers; and (4) an HPC-as-API proxy mode that exposes HPC inference as an OpenAI-compatible endpoint callable from any standard client with no HPC expertise, a deployment pattern made practical only by the sub-second TTFT of contribution (2). Llama 3.2 3B achieves 85.1% free-tier retention on a 1,200-query benchmark spanning ten domains. Measured TTFT: 0.26 s local, 0.54 s HPC (relay), 1.68 s cloud.
Real-Time Language Model Jamming: A Case Study for Live Music Accompaniment Generation
Language models (LMs) have become one of the most prominent paradigms in modern generative modeling. While making them faster has been the main focus of real-time deployment, speed alone is not enough. Many real-world applications, such as synchronized translation and voice synthesis, also require precise alignment between generation and external signals, both in terms of generation content and timing. We refer to this problem as frame-synchronous streaming inference. To address it, we present StreamMUSE, an inference system that performs LM generation in response to an external signal stream within a client-server architecture. The client continuously sends high-frequency inference requests based on the most recent inputs and receives outputs synchronized to the external clock, while the server executes model inference. We demonstrate the framework through a live music accompaniment task, showing how real-time synchronization can be achieved across different deployment environments with varying round-trip latencies. We further model the relationship between system hyperparameters and round-trip latency, and evaluate how different environments affect optimal configurations to achieve real-time performance. Experimental results show a consistent correspondence between system real-time performance and music quality, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The project is open source. Relevant code and the latest updates are available at https://stream-muse-webpage.vercel.app/#audio-library.
Harnessing Streaming Video in the Wild
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly required to process unbounded video streams in applications such as video-call assistants, live commentary, and embodied robots. An ideal streaming system should support proactive interaction, long-horizon memory, and real-time processing, while resting on a VLM backbone capable of handling diverse in-the-wild streaming tasks. However, existing VLMs excel at offline video understanding but fall short in streaming capabilities and lack dedicated infrastructure for streaming deployment. We address this gap on three fronts. (i) For backbone capability, we construct Streaming-Train-248K, a streaming dataset paired with a novel training objective for adapting VLMs to streaming interaction and understanding. (ii) For real-world deployment, we introduce Streaming Harness, a plug-and-play system that endows any VLM with three core abilities: proactive interaction (per-second response decisions), long-term memory (12-hour context retention), and real-time processing (sub-second latency). (iii) To drive continued community progress on streaming capabilities, we design Streaming-Eval, a benchmark that reflects models' capabilities across diverse in-the-wild scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent gains from our approach across all core capabilities required for streaming video understanding. We will open-source our data, code, and benchmark to advance the community's shift from offline video understanding to deployable streaming intelligence.
TRADE: Transducer-Augmented Decoder for Speech LLM
Speech Large Language Models (Speech LLMs) lack a principled mechanism for streaming inference: their label-synchronous generation has no acoustic-frame alignment, making real-time decoding and end-of-utterance detection difficult. We propose TRADE TRansducer-Augmented DEcoder, which augments a multimodal LLM with a transducer branch that shares the audio encoder and uses the LLM's hidden states directly as the prediction network -- coupling frame-synchronous acoustic alignment with the LLM's linguistic reasoning. Three design choices make the system accurate, streamable, and long-form capable: (1)Tightly coupled dual vocabularies -- a compact transducer vocabulary derived from the LLM vocabulary, enabling zero-cost score fusion; (2)Chunk-synchronized streaming training with gradient stopping, eliminating the train-inference mismatch at offline-equivalent memory cost; and (3)Localized Decoder Audio Attention (LDAA), a causal sliding window that caps KV-cache memory independently of utterance length. A single TRADE checkpoint supports offline and streaming decoding across a continuous range of latency operating points. TRADE achieves 6.71% average WER on the Open ASR Leaderboard, while the streaming recognition with 960ms chunk size reaches 8.40% from the same checkpoint. On long-form speech, it obtains 3.64% WER on TED-LIUM and 10.88% on Earnings-22 without external segmentation. TRADE provides sentence-end punctuation timestamps that, when combined with acoustic voice activity detection (VAD), improve end-of-utterance detection by +0.03 F_1 over acoustic VAD alone.
OmniInteract: Benchmarking Real-World Streaming Interaction for Real-Time Omnimodal Assistants
We introduce OmniInteract, a streaming benchmark for real-time omnimodal large language models evaluated through native online inference over audio-visual streams. Unlike offline video understanding or text-prompted streaming QA, OmniInteract preserves the original audio-visual stream and requires models to process it online, without access to future content. User queries and ambient sounds are embedded in the audio track, requiring models to detect multimodal triggers, decide when to respond, and answer while the stream unfolds. OmniInteract contains 250 videos with 1,430 temporally grounded response slots: 1,062 1Q1A slots across real-time, proactive, and nested scenarios, and 368 1QnA slots for continuous task monitoring and step guidance. Each slot includes a trigger, response window, and target answer. We evaluate response correctness, timing, invalid outputs, interruption handling, and context continuity using Interaction-Aware Quality-Timeliness F1, Interruption Diagnostic Suite, and Nested Chain Completion Score. Experiments show that current models remain weak in streaming interaction, with the best overall IA-QTF1 reaching only 0.368 and the best 1QnA IA-QTF1 only 0.052. Further study on mathematical reasoning in full-duplex settings shows that offline capability does not necessarily transfer to online interaction. Code and datasets will be made publicly accessible at https://github.com/Lucky-Lance/OmniInteract.
An Efficient Streaming Video Understanding Framework with Agentic Control
Streaming video requires handling dynamic information density under strict latency budgets. Yet, existing methods typically employ static strategies, such as fixed memory compression or reliance on a single model, forcing a trade-off: fast models fail on complex queries, while always-on heavy models violate real-time constraints and overcomplicate simple queries. Rather than fixing these decisions upfront, we propose R3-Streaming (Remember, Respond, Reason), which formulates streaming video understanding as a cascaded control problem: for each query, the system compresses memory, judges response readiness, and routes computation sequentially, so that each downstream decision builds on progressively refined information states. To optimize this pipeline, we introduce an age-aware forgetting policy for memory compression, as aggressively compressing historical frames can yield substantial performance gains. For compute routing, we propose TB-GRPO, a target-balanced reinforcement learning objective that routes hard queries to a stronger model while preventing mode collapse. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that R3-Streaming achieves state-of-the-art results among streaming MLLMs, reaching 57.92 on OVO-Bench and 76.36 on StreamingBench, while reducing visual token usage by 95 to 96 percent.
Attention Once Is All You Need: Efficient Streaming Inference with Stateful Transformers
Conventional transformer inference engines are request-driven, paying an O(n) prefill cost on every query. In streaming workloads, where data arrives continuously and queries probe an ever-growing context, this cost is prohibitive. We introduce a data-driven computational model centred on stateful sessions: a persistent KV cache advanced incrementally as new data arrives, so prefill is moved off the critical path and query latency becomes O(|q|), independent of accumulated context size. Building on this, Flash Queries reclaim idle GPU cycles between data arrivals to pre-evaluate registered questions and return cached answers before the user asks, a pattern that is structurally impossible in stateless engines because they discard intermediate state between requests. A multi-tenant continuous-batching scheduler with cell-budget admission and prefix-aware grouped prefill lets dozens of stateful sessions coexist on a single GPU while preserving full quadratic self-attention. On streaming market-data benchmarks the reference implementation achieves up to 5.9x speedup over conventional inference engines (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, llama.cpp), holding query latency constant as accumulated context grows.
EvoStreaming: Your Offline Video Model Is a Natively Streaming Assistant
Streaming video understanding demands more than watching longer videos: assistants must decide when to speak in real time, balancing responsiveness against verbosity. Yet most video-language models (VideoLLMs) are trained for offline inference, and existing streaming benchmarks externalize this timing decision to the evaluator. We address this gap with RealStreamEval, a frame-level multi-turn evaluation protocol that exposes models to sequential observations and penalizes unnecessary responses. Under this protocol, we observed that strong offline VideoLLMs retain useful visual understanding but lack an interaction policy for deciding when to respond. Motivated by this observation, we propose EvoStreaming, a self-evolved streaming adaptation framework in which the base model itself acts as data generator, relevance annotator, and roll-out policy to synthesize streaming trajectories without external supervision. With only self-generated samples ( less than the leading streaming instruction-tuning approach) and no architectural changes, EvoStreaming consistently improves the overall RealStreamEval score by up to points across five open VideoLLM backbones (Qwen2/2.5/3-VL, InternVL-3.5, MiniCPM-V4.5) while largely preserving offline video performance. These results suggest that data-efficient interaction tuning is a practical path for adapting existing VideoLLMs to streaming assistants.
StreamPhy: Streaming Inference of High-Dimensional Physical Dynamics via State Space Models
Inferring the evolution of high-dimensional and multi-modal (e.g., spatio-temporal) physical fields from irregular sparse measurements in real time is a fundamental challenge in science and engineering. Existing approaches, including diffusion-based generative models and functional tensor methods, typically operate in offline settings, depend on full temporal observations, or incur substantial inference cost. We propose StreamPhy, an end-to-end framework that enables efficient and accurate streaming inference of full-field physical dynamics from incoming irregular sparse measurements. The framework integrates a data-adaptive observation encoder that is robust to arbitrary observation patterns, a structured state-space model that supports memory-efficient online updates across irregular time intervals, and an expressive Functional Tensor Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FT-FiLM) decoder for continuous-field generation. We prove that FT-FiLM is more expressive than the functional Tucker model, admitting a richer function class for handling complex dynamics. Experiments on three representative physical systems under challenging sampling patterns show that StreamPhy consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with at least 48% improvement in accuracy and up to 20--100X faster inference than diffusion-based methods.
SURGE: SuperBatch Unified Resource-efficient GPU Encoding for Heterogeneous Partitioned Data
We present SURGE, a streaming GPU encoding system deployed in production to generate embeddings for over 800 million texts across 40,000 logical partitions. Production embedding pipelines face a tension between logical data partitioning and efficient GPU utilization: processing each partition independently incurs inter-process communication (IPC) calls whose overhead limits throughput for compute-light models. Our contributions are analytical: (i) a cost model (Theorem 1) predicting throughput within 2% across three encoders spanning a 15 parameter range; (ii) a memory-safety bound (Lemma 3) enabling a streaming two-threshold policy with peak memory rather than ; and (iii) a /CV decision framework characterizing when the pattern applies beyond our workload. The naive fix of batching at fixed size requires peak memory (32.7 GB at 10M texts; infeasible beyond ~60M on 192 GB nodes), produces no output until all encoding completes, and offers no fault tolerance. SURGE achieves the same throughput with bounded memory (2.6 GB), 68 faster time-to-first-output, and crash recovery at SuperBatch granularity. On 10M texts with 4 NVIDIA L4 GPUs, SURGE delivers 26,413 texts/s -- matching fixed-batch throughput while using 12.6 less memory. We validate on bge-base (109M, =768, error 1.3%) and across log-normal in {1.0, 1.72, 2.5} (speedup invariant within 3%), and compare against a partition-batched baseline (PB-PBP-LB), against which SURGE retains a 7% throughput edge and 2.5 faster TTFO. Complementary engineering -- zero-copy Arrow serialization (22-25 speedup) and async I/O pipelining (up to 93% benefit) -- realizes the design but is not the contribution.