AURA: Always-On Understanding and Real-Time Assistance via Video Streams

🤗 Upvotes: 39 | cs.CV Authors: Xudong Lu, Yang Bo, Jinpeng Chen, Shuhan Li, Xintong Guo, Huankang Guan, Fang Liu, Dunyuan Xu, Peiwen Sun, Heyang Sun, Rui Liu, Hongsheng Li Title: AURA: Always-On Understanding and Real-Time Assistance via Video Streams Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04184v1 Abstract: Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) have achieved strong performance on many video understanding tasks, but most existing systems remain offline and are not well-suited for live video streams that require continuous observation and timely response. Recent streaming VideoLLMs have made progress, yet current approaches often rely on decoupled trigger-response pipelines or are limited to captioning-style narration, reducing their effectiveness for open-ended question answering and long-horizon interaction. We propose AURA (Always-On Understanding and Real-Time Assistance), an end-to-end streaming visual interaction framework that enables a unified VideoLLM to continuously process video streams and support both real-time question answering and proactive responses. AURA integrates context management, data construction, training objectives, and deployment optimization for stable long-horizon streaming interaction. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on streaming benchmarks and supports a real-time demo system with ASR and TTS running at 2 FPS on two 80G accelerators. We release the AURA model together with a real-time inference framework to facilitate future research.