# StreamChat: Chatting with Streaming Video

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08646 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08646/

## Key facts

- Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video understanding with MLLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 71 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16125/) (2023)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [VideoLLaMA 3: Frontier Multimodal Foundation Models for Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13106/) (2025)
- [Video-MMLU: A Massive Multi-Discipline Lecture Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14693/) (2025)
- [Accelerating Streaming Video Large Language Models via Hierarchical Token Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00891/) (2025)
- [VideoITG: Multimodal Video Understanding with Instructed Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13353/) (2025)
- [RIVER: A Real-Time Interaction Benchmark for Video LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03985/) (2026)
- [Towards Online Multi-Modal Social Interaction Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19851/) (2025)
- [Learning Streaming Video Representation via Multitask Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20041/) (2025)
- [StreamingAssistant: Efficient Visual Token Pruning for Accelerating Online Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12560/) (2025)
- [LiveCC: Learning Video LLM with Streaming Speech Transcription at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16030/) (2025)
- [Think While Watching: Online Streaming Segment-Level Memory for Multi-Turn Video Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11896/) (2026)
- [Think-as-You-See: Streaming Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02872/) (2026)
- [StreamOV: Streaming Omni-Video Understanding via Evidence-Guided Memory and Response Triggering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25621/) (2026)
- [Vinci2: Providing Proactive Assistance in Continuous Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11523/) (2026)
- [FOLIO: Focused Semantic Memory for Streaming Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13298/) (2026)
- [Can Multi-Modal LLMs Provide Live Step-by-Step Task Guidance?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21998/) (2025)
- [WAT: Online Video Understanding Needs Watching Before Thinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13412/) (2026)
- [CASA: Cross-Attention over Self-Attention for Efficient Vision-Language Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19535/) (2025)
- [Stream3D-VLM: Online 3D Spatial Understanding with Incremental Geometry Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06891/) (2026)
- [Think in Sets for Streaming Video Token Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01169/) (2026)
- [SVMemAgent: A Streaming Video Memory Agent for Query-Agnostic Online Frame Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18540/) (2026)
- [How Should LLMs Listen While Speaking? A Study of User-Stream Routing in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10199/) (2026)
- [ProactiveLLM: Learning Active Interaction for Streaming Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00523/) (2026)
- [LLMs are General Asynchronous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35427/) (2026)
- [Proactive Physical AI through Continuous Observation and Timely Intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16967/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents StreamChat, a novel approach that enhances the interaction capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with streaming video content. In streaming interaction scenarios, existing methods rely solely on visual information available at the moment a question is posed, resulting in significant delays as the model remains unaware of subsequent changes in the streaming video. StreamChat addresses this limitation by innovatively updating the visual context at each decoding step, ensuring that the model utilizes up-to-date video content throughout the decoding process. Additionally, we introduce a flexible and efficient crossattention-based architecture to process dynamic streaming inputs while maintaining inference efficiency for streaming interactions. Furthermore, we construct a new dense instruction dataset to facilitate the training of streaming interaction models, complemented by a parallel 3D-RoPE mechanism that encodes the relative temporal information of visual and text tokens. Experimental results demonstrate that StreamChat achieves competitive performance on established image and video benchmarks and exhibits superior capabilities in streaming interaction scenarios compared to state-of-the-art video LMM.