StreamBridge: Turning Your Offline Video Large Language Model into a Proactive Streaming Assistant

Haibo Wang, Bo Feng, Zhengfeng Lai, Mingze Xu, Shiyu Li, Weifeng Ge, Afshin Dehghan, Meng Cao, Ping Huang

Keywords: Video Large Language Model; Streaming Video Understanding

TL;DR: We present StreamBridge, a framework that transforms offline Video-LLMs into streaming models.

Abstract: We present StreamBridge, a simple yet effective framework that seamlessly transforms offline Video-LLMs into streaming-capable models. It addresses two fundamental challenges in adapting existing models into online scenarios: (1) limited capability for multi-turn real-time understanding, and (2) lack of proactive response mechanisms. Specifically, StreamBridge incorporates (1) a memory buffer combined with a round-decayed compression strategy, supporting long-context multi-turn interactions, and (2) a decoupled, lightweight activation model that can be effortlessly integrated into existing Video-LLMs, enabling continuous proactive responses. To further support StreamBridge, we construct Stream-IT, a large-scale dataset tailored for streaming video understanding, featuring interleaved video-text sequences and diverse instruction formats. Extensive experiments show that StreamBridge significantly improves the streaming understanding capabilities of offline Video-LLMs across various tasks, outperforming even proprietary models such as GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro. Simultaneously, it achieves competitive or superior performance on standard video understanding benchmarks.

Primary Area: Applications (e.g., vision, language, speech and audio, Creative AI)

Submission Number: 10048