Going Down Memory Lane: Scaling Tokens for Video Stream Understanding with Dynamic KV-Cache Memory

TL;DR

MemStream enhances video stream understanding by scaling token usage and employing adaptive and external retrieval strategies, significantly improving performance on multiple benchmarks.

Contribution

This work introduces MemStream, a novel approach that scales token budgets and incorporates adaptive selection and external models for better dense video stream understanding.

Findings

+8.0% on CG-Bench

+8.5% on LVBench

+2.4% on VideoMME (Long)

Abstract

Streaming video understanding requires models to robustly encode, store, and retrieve information from a continuous video stream to support accurate video question answering (VQA). Existing state-of-the-art approaches rely on key-value caching to accumulate frame-level information over time, but use a limited number of tokens per frame, leading to the loss of fine-grained visual details. In this work, we propose scaling the token budget to enable more granular spatiotemporal understanding and reasoning. First, we find that current methods are ill-equipped to handle dense streams: their feature encoding causes query-frame similarity scores to increase over time, biasing retrieval toward later frames. To address this, we introduce an adaptive selection strategy that reduces token redundancy while preserving local spatiotemporal information. We further propose a training-free retrieval mixture-of-experts that leverages external models to better identify relevant frames. Our method, MemStream, achieves +8.0% on CG-Bench, +8.5% on LVBench, and +2.4% on VideoMME (Long) over ReKV with Qwen2.5-VL-7B.