TimeChat-Online: 80% Visual Tokens are Naturally Redundant in Streaming Videos

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yao, Linli, Li, Yicheng, Wei, Yuancheng, Li, Lei, Ren, Shuhuai, Liu, Yuanxin, Ouyang, Kun, Wang, Lean, Li, Shicheng, Li, Sida, Kong, Lingpeng, Liu, Qi, Zhang, Yuanxing, Sun, Xu
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Published: 2025
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author Yao, Linli
Li, Yicheng
Wei, Yuancheng
Li, Lei
Ren, Shuhuai
Liu, Yuanxin
Ouyang, Kun
Wang, Lean
Li, Shicheng
Li, Sida
Kong, Lingpeng
Liu, Qi
Zhang, Yuanxing
Sun, Xu
author_facet Yao, Linli
Li, Yicheng
Wei, Yuancheng
Li, Lei
Ren, Shuhuai
Liu, Yuanxin
Ouyang, Kun
Wang, Lean
Li, Shicheng
Li, Sida
Kong, Lingpeng
Liu, Qi
Zhang, Yuanxing
Sun, Xu
contents The rapid growth of online video platforms, particularly live streaming services, has created an urgent need for real-time video understanding systems. These systems must process continuous video streams and respond to user queries instantaneously, presenting unique challenges for current Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs). While existing VideoLLMs excel at processing complete videos, they face significant limitations in streaming scenarios due to their inability to handle dense, redundant frames efficiently. We introduce TimeChat-Online, a novel online VideoLLM that revolutionizes real-time video interaction. At its core lies our innovative Differential Token Drop (DTD) module, which addresses the fundamental challenge of visual redundancy in streaming videos. Drawing inspiration from human visual perception's Change Blindness phenomenon, DTD preserves meaningful temporal changes while filtering out static, redundant content between frames. Remarkably, our experiments demonstrate that DTD achieves an 82.8% reduction in video tokens while maintaining 98% performance on StreamingBench, revealing that over 80% of visual content in streaming videos is naturally redundant without requiring language guidance. To enable seamless real-time interaction, we present TimeChat-Online-139K, a comprehensive streaming video dataset featuring diverse interaction patterns including backward-tracing, current-perception, and future-responding scenarios. TimeChat-Online's unique Proactive Response capability, naturally achieved through continuous monitoring of video scene transitions via DTD, sets it apart from conventional approaches. Our extensive evaluation demonstrates TimeChat-Online's superior performance on streaming benchmarks (StreamingBench and OvOBench) and maintaining competitive results on long-form video tasks such as Video-MME and MLVU.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_17343
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TimeChat-Online: 80% Visual Tokens are Naturally Redundant in Streaming Videos
Yao, Linli
Li, Yicheng
Wei, Yuancheng
Li, Lei
Ren, Shuhuai
Liu, Yuanxin
Ouyang, Kun
Wang, Lean
Li, Shicheng
Li, Sida
Kong, Lingpeng
Liu, Qi
Zhang, Yuanxing
Sun, Xu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The rapid growth of online video platforms, particularly live streaming services, has created an urgent need for real-time video understanding systems. These systems must process continuous video streams and respond to user queries instantaneously, presenting unique challenges for current Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs). While existing VideoLLMs excel at processing complete videos, they face significant limitations in streaming scenarios due to their inability to handle dense, redundant frames efficiently. We introduce TimeChat-Online, a novel online VideoLLM that revolutionizes real-time video interaction. At its core lies our innovative Differential Token Drop (DTD) module, which addresses the fundamental challenge of visual redundancy in streaming videos. Drawing inspiration from human visual perception's Change Blindness phenomenon, DTD preserves meaningful temporal changes while filtering out static, redundant content between frames. Remarkably, our experiments demonstrate that DTD achieves an 82.8% reduction in video tokens while maintaining 98% performance on StreamingBench, revealing that over 80% of visual content in streaming videos is naturally redundant without requiring language guidance. To enable seamless real-time interaction, we present TimeChat-Online-139K, a comprehensive streaming video dataset featuring diverse interaction patterns including backward-tracing, current-perception, and future-responding scenarios. TimeChat-Online's unique Proactive Response capability, naturally achieved through continuous monitoring of video scene transitions via DTD, sets it apart from conventional approaches. Our extensive evaluation demonstrates TimeChat-Online's superior performance on streaming benchmarks (StreamingBench and OvOBench) and maintaining competitive results on long-form video tasks such as Video-MME and MLVU.
title TimeChat-Online: 80% Visual Tokens are Naturally Redundant in Streaming Videos
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17343