CurveStream: Boosting Streaming Video Understanding in MLLMs via Curvature-Aware Hierarchical Visual Memory Management
Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved significant success in offline video understanding, yet their application to streaming videos is severely limited by the linear explosion of visual tokens, which often leads to Out-of-Memory (OOM) errors or catastrophic forgetting. Existing visual retention and memory management methods typically rely on uniform sampling, low-level physical metrics, or passive cache eviction. However, these strategies often lack intrinsic semantic awareness, potentially disrupting contextual coherence and blurring transient yet critical semantic transitions. To address these limitations, we propose CurveStream, a training-free, curvature-aware hierarchical visual memory management framework. Our approach is motivated by the key observation that high-curvature regions along continuous feature trajectories closely align with critical global semantic transitions. Based on this geometric insight, CurveStream evaluates real-time semantic intensity via a Curvature Score and integrates an online K-Sigma dynamic threshold to adaptively route frames into clear and fuzzy memory states under a strict token budget. Evaluations across diverse temporal scales confirm that this lightweight framework, CurveStream, consistently yields absolute performance gains of over 10% (e.g., 10.69% on StreamingBench and 13.58% on OVOBench) over respective baselines, establishing new state-of-the-art results for streaming video perception.The code will be released at https://github.com/streamingvideos/CurveStream.
69c11be3fe5f408f1bf751ce
Chao Wang
claimed_verified
2026-03-23T10:58:48.588Z
66606efc0911c0a2a1e19106
/avatars/38e73522b9efbdf66923eea41d717005.svg
wwwc
wangchao668
user
wangchao668
69c11be3fe5f408f1bf751cf
Xudong Tan
69c11be3fe5f408f1bf751d0
Jianjian Cao
69c11be3fe5f408f1bf751d1
Kangcong Li
69c11be3fe5f408f1bf751d2
Tao Chen
CurveStream: Boosting Streaming Video Understanding in MLLMs via Curvature-Aware Hierarchical Visual Memory Management
Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved significant success in offline video understanding, yet their application to streaming videos is severely limited by the linear explosion of visual tokens, which often leads to Out-of-Memory (OOM) errors or catastrophic forgetting. Existing visual retention and memory management methods typically rely on uniform sampling, low-level physical metrics, or passive cache eviction. However, these strategies often lack intrinsic semantic awareness, potentially disrupting contextual coherence and blurring transient yet critical semantic transitions. To address these limitations, we propose CurveStream, a training-free, curvature-aware hierarchical visual memory management framework. Our approach is motivated by the key observation that high-curvature regions along continuous feature trajectories closely align with critical global semantic transitions. Based on this geometric insight, CurveStream evaluates real-time semantic intensity via a Curvature Score and integrates an online K-Sigma dynamic threshold to adaptively route frames into clear and fuzzy memory states under a strict token budget. Evaluations across diverse temporal scales confirm that this lightweight framework, CurveStream, consistently yields absolute performance gains of over 10% (e.g., 10.69% on StreamingBench and 13.58% on OVOBench) over respective baselines, establishing new state-of-the-art results for streaming video perception.The code will be released at https://github.com/streamingvideos/CurveStream.
CurveStream is a curvature-aware hierarchical visual memory management framework that improves streaming video perception by dynamically routing frames based on semantic intensity and geometric features.
multimodal large language models visual tokens Out-of-Memory errors visual retention memory management uniform sampling low-level physical metrics passive cache eviction semantic awareness contextual coherence curvature-aware Curvature Score K-Sigma dynamic threshold token budget streaming video perception geometric insight feature trajectories semantic transitions