StreamForest: Efficient Online Video Understanding with Persistent Event Memory

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress in video understanding. However, their effectiveness in real-time streaming scenarios remains limited due to storage constraints of historical visual features and insufficient real-time spatiotemporal reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose StreamForest, a novel architecture specifically designed for streaming video understanding. Central to StreamForest is the Persistent Event Memory Forest, a memory mechanism that adaptively organizes video frames into multiple event-level tree structures. This process is guided by penalty functions based on temporal distance, content similarity, and merge frequency, enabling efficient long-term memory retention under limited computational resources.