# StreamReady: Learning What to Answer and When in Long Streaming Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08620 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08620/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [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)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09126/) (2023)
- [ActivityNet-QA: A Dataset for Understanding Complex Web Videos via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02467/) (2019)
- [LLaMA-VID: An Image is Worth 2 Tokens in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17043/) (2023)
- [MovieChat: From Dense Token to Sparse Memory for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16449/) (2023)
- [Long Context Transfer from Language to Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16852/) (2024)
- [TimeChat: A Time-sensitive Multimodal Large Language Model for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02051/) (2023)
- [LongVU: Spatiotemporal Adaptive Compression for Long Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17434/) (2024)
- [VideoAgent: Long-form Video Understanding with Large Language Model as Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10517/) (2024)
- [VideoMamba: State Space Model for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06977/) (2024)
- [VideoTree: Adaptive Tree-based Video Representation for LLM Reasoning on Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19209/) (2024)
- [MA-LMM: Memory-Augmented Large Multimodal Model for Long-Term Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05726/) (2024)
- [VideoLLM-online: Online Video Large Language Model for Streaming Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11816/) (2024)
- [VideoChat-Flash: Hierarchical Compression for Long-Context Video Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00574/) (2024)
- [MovieNet: A Holistic Dataset for Movie Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10937/) (2020)
- [VITA-1.5: Towards GPT-4o Level Real-Time Vision and Speech Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01957/) (2025)
- [Flash-VStream: Memory-Based Real-Time Understanding for Long Video Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08085/) (2024)
- [Streaming Long Video Understanding with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16009/) (2024)
- [StreamingBench: Assessing the Gap for MLLMs to Achieve Streaming Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03628/) (2024)
- [OVO-Bench: How Far is Your Video-LLMs from Real-World Online Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05510/) (2025)
- [Dispider: Enabling Video LLMs with Active Real-Time Interaction via Disentangled Perception, Decision, and Reaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03218/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [A Simple Baseline for Streaming Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02317/) (2026)
- [IPIBench: Evaluating Interactive Proactive Intelligence of MLLMs under Continuous Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27074/) (2026)
- [StreamOV: Streaming Omni-Video Understanding via Evidence-Guided Memory and Response Triggering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25621/) (2026)
- [StreamTTT: Reconciling Real-Time Perception and Long-Term Memory in Streaming VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13416/) (2026)
- [StreamScout: Learning When to Look Deeper for Streaming Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00291/) (2026)
- [GROVE: Growing and Reasoning over Temporally Stratified Memory from Streaming Video Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02392/) (2026)
- [ShallowStream: Index Shallow then Answer Deep for Streaming Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02780/) (2026)
- [Don't Pause: Streaming Video-Language Synchrony for Online Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06991/) (2026)
- [Beyond Retrieval: Progressive Latent Memory Evolution for Streaming Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04131/) (2026)
- [Omni-Streaming Thinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15128/) (2026)
- [OneStreamer: Unifying Perception, Memory, and Proactive Response in Streaming Video Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01762/) (2026)
- [VISTA: Video Interaction Spatio-Temporal Analysis Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01391/) (2026)
- [Companion-style QA Assistance in Ego-Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06721/) (2026)
- [LiveProBench: Can Streaming Video Models Really Interact Like Humans?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12658/) (2026)
- [Live Assistant: Learning Whether, When, and Whom to Assist in Real-World Live Social Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27303/) (2026)
- [STORM-Bench: Evaluating Online Video QA under Evolving and Incomplete Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30981/) (2026)
- [Agentic Video Understanding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31713/) (2026)
- [FlashBack: Knowing When to Remember in Streaming Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01192/) (2026)
- [Foresight: planning future perception in streaming VLMs without retraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03123/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Streaming video understanding often involves time-sensitive scenarios where models need to answer exactly when the supporting visual evidence appears: answering before the evidence reflects speculation, answering after it has passed reduces real-time utility. To capture this behavior, we introduce a readiness-aware formulation of streaming video understanding with the Answer Readiness Score (ARS), a timing-aware objective with asymmetric early and late penalties. When combined with correctness, ARS defines an effective accuracy that measures not just whether a model is right, but whether it answers at the appropriate moment. Building on this formulation, we introduce StreamReady, a framework to unify temporal reasoning with on-time answering through a lightweight readiness mechanism that decides if sufficient evidence has been observed before responding. To evaluate this capability, we further introduce ProReady-QA, a benchmark with annotated answer evidence windows and proactive multi-turn questions across local and global contexts. StreamReady achieves superior performance on ProReady-QA, and consistently outperforms prior methods across eight additional streaming and offline long-video benchmarks, demonstrating robust and broadly generalizable video understanding capability.