CogStream: Context-guided Streaming Video Question Answering

Abstract Despite advancements in Video Large Language Models (Vid-LLMs) improving multimodal understanding, challenges persist in streaming video reasoning due to its reliance on contextual information. Existing paradigms feed all available historical contextual information into Vid-LLMs, resulting in a significant computational burden for visual data processing. Furthermore, the inclusion of irrelevant context distracts models from key details. This paper introduces a challenging task called Context-guided Streaming Video Reasoning (CogStream), which simulates real-world streaming video scenarios, requiring models to identify the most relevant historical contextual information to deduce answers for questions about the current stream. To support CogStream, we present a densely annotated dataset featuring extensive and hierarchical question-answer pairs, generated by a semi-automatic pipeline. Additionally, we present CogReasoner as a baseline model. It effectively tackles this task by leveraging visual stream compression and historical dialogue retrieval. Extensive experiments prove the effectiveness of this method.