AViLA: Asynchronous Vision-Language Agent for Streaming Multimodal Data Interaction

TL;DR

AViLA is a novel asynchronous vision-language agent designed to interact with streaming multimodal data, effectively handling ad-hoc queries with temporal awareness and evidence grounding, advancing real-world applications like autonomous driving.

Contribution

The paper introduces AViLA, a new asynchronous multimodal agent with memory and evidence modules, and a benchmark for evaluating such models on streaming data interaction.

Findings

AViLA significantly improves response accuracy in streaming scenarios.

Existing models often fail to respond timely or accurately.

AViLA demonstrates enhanced temporal awareness and evidence grounding.

Abstract

An ideal vision-language agent serves as a bridge between the human users and their surrounding physical world in real-world applications like autonomous driving and embodied agents, and proactively provides accurate and timely responses given user intents. An intriguing challenge arises when agents interact with the world as a dynamic data stream and ad-hoc queries from users: supporting knowledge for queries, namely evidence, usually appears asynchronously with the arrival time of queries, and agents need to ground their responses in historical data, present observations, and even future streams. We frame this challenge as Query-Evidence Asynchrony, where user queries and their supporting evidence typically arrive asynchronously in the streaming setting. This setting requires not only strong reasoning capabilities but also the ability to retain past observations and respond to queries with temporal awareness. In this paper, we introduce a diagnostic benchmark that evaluates Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on their ability to handle interaction with streaming data. Further, we present AViLA, Asynchronous Video-Language Agent for streaming data interaction that can handle ad-hoc queries and give time-aware responses. For this purpose, AViLA consists of three key modules: comprehensive memory retention, evidence identification, and evidence-grounded trigger, that are designed to maintain a general-purpose memory and respond readily and timely to queries. Our experiments show that existing models often fail to respond at appropriate times, while AViLA significantly improves both accuracy and temporal awareness. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.