# From Static Inference to Dynamic Interaction: A Survey of Streaming Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04592 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04592/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 157 of its 217 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 157)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17192/) (2022)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01318/) (2023)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [SnapKV: LLM Knows What You are Looking for Before Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14469/) (2024)
- [Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10774/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Model Beats Diffusion: Llama for Scalable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06525/) (2024)
- [Muse: Text-To-Image Generation via Masked Generative Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00704/) (2023)
- [Subword Regularization: Improving Neural Network Translation Models with Multiple Subword Candidates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10959/) (2018)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [KVQuant: Towards 10 Million Context Length LLM Inference with KV Cache Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18079/) (2024)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [SpeechGPT: Empowering Large Language Models with Intrinsic Cross-Modal Conversational Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11000/) (2023)
- [Gated Linear Attention Transformers with Hardware-Efficient Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06635/) (2023)
- [VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14125/) (2023)
- [DiffuSeq: Sequence to Sequence Text Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08933/) (2022)
- [Scissorhands: Exploiting the Persistence of Importance Hypothesis for LLM KV Cache Compression at Test Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17118/) (2023)
- [Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15687/) (2023)
- [EAGLE-2: Faster Inference of Language Models with Dynamic Draft Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16858/) (2024)
- [Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19737/) (2024)
- [AudioPaLM: A Large Language Model That Can Speak and Listen](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12925/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Engagement Process: Rethinking the Temporal Interface of Action and Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11484/) (2026)
- [ProactiveLLM: Learning Active Interaction for Streaming Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00523/) (2026)
- [ACPruner: Visual Token Pruning as Biased Attention Coverage Maximization in LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34558/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Standard Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly designed for static inference with pre-defined inputs, which limits their applicability in dynamic, real-time scenarios. To address this gap, the streaming LLM paradigm has emerged. However, existing definitions of streaming LLMs remain fragmented, conflating streaming generation, streaming inputs, and interactive streaming architectures, while a systematic taxonomy is still lacking. This paper provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of streaming LLMs. First, we establish a unified definition of streaming LLMs based on data flow and dynamic interaction to clarify existing ambiguities. Building on this definition, we propose a systematic taxonomy of current streaming LLMs and conduct an in-depth discussion on their underlying methodologies. Furthermore, we explore the applications of streaming LLMs in real-world scenarios and outline promising research directions to support ongoing advances in streaming intelligence. We maintain a continuously updated repository of relevant papers at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/Awesome-Streaming-LLMs.
