Multi-Stream Streaming Understanding Benchmark

X-Stream: Exploring MLLMs as Multiplexers for Multi-Stream Understanding

Peiwen Sun¹^*, Xudong Lu¹^*, Huadai Liu³^*, Yang Bo², Dongming Wu¹, Huankang Guan², Minghong Cai¹, Jinpeng Chen², Xintong Guo², Shuhan Li², Fang Liu², Rui Liu², Xiangyu Yue¹

¹MMLab, The Chinese University of Hong Kong ²Huawei Inc. ³Independent

HuggingFace Code arXiv Website BibTeX

X-Stream multi-stream scenarios — X-Stream covers multi-angle, multi-view, and multi-device streaming scenarios.

X-Stream evaluates whether MLLMs can continuously integrate multiple synchronized streams instead of taking single-stream shortcuts.

4,220curated QA pairs

932videos

451multi-stream takes

160hretained data

11progressive subtasks

2-5streams per take

Overview

While video streaming understanding has made significant strides, real-world applications such as live sports broadcasting, autonomous driving, and multi-screen collaboration inherently demand continuous, multi-stream interactions. Existing benchmarks are confined to single-stream paradigms, leaving a critical gap in evaluating online, cross-stream reasoning.

We introduce X-Stream, the first benchmark dedicated to multi-stream streaming understanding. It comprises 4,220 rigorously curated QA pairs across 932 videos and evaluates 11 subtasks across multi-window, multi-view, and multi-device scenarios.

X-Stream uses a dual-verification pipeline to prevent over-reliance on a single stream. We further conceptualize MLLMs as naive multiplexers and evaluate spatial, time, and semantic division strategies under a fixed token budget. Current state-of-the-art MLLMs still struggle with concurrent streams, achieving only about 50% overall score and showing poor proactive ability.

Multi-stream task illustration — Multi-stream tasks require synchronized videos with temporal constraints and alignment, while preserving online streaming properties.

First Multi-Stream Streaming Benchmark

X-Stream evaluates online understanding over concurrent streams from multi-window, multi-view, and multi-device settings.

Shortcut-Resistant Data Protocol

Sufficiency and necessity verification filter pseudo multi-stream questions and retain samples requiring joint evidence.

MLLMs as Multiplexers

The benchmark exposes trade-offs among spatial, time, and semantic division multiplexing for future multi-stream agents.

Benchmark and Dataset

X-Stream is built from 857 hours of raw multi-stream data across more than 20 sources. After preprocessing and pairing, 160 hours are retained across 451 takes with 2 to 5 streams.

X-Stream ability taxonomy — Four multi-stream abilities and 11 progressive subtasks.

Benchmark Comparison

Tasks	Dataset	QA	Videos	Videos / Take	Duration (h)	Cross Stream	Open Ended	Streaming	Proactive
Multi-View and Multi-Video	EgoLife-Eval	0.3K	1	6	20	No	No	No	No
Multi-View and Multi-Video	ProMQA-Assembly	0.4K	0.2K	2	7	No	Yes	No	No
Multi-View and Multi-Video	WaymoQA	6.4K	~1K	2	~2	Yes	Yes	No	No
Multi-View and Multi-Video	MVU-Bench	1.8K	5K	3-5	15	No	No	No	No
Multi-View and Multi-Video	VidDiff	4.5K	0.5K	2	3	No	Yes	No	No
Streaming	OVO-Bench	2.8K	0.6K	1	85	No	No	Yes	Yes
Streaming	StreamingBench	4.5K	0.9K	1	136	No	No	Yes	Yes
Streaming	Inf-Streams-Eval	2.5K	0.5K	1	42	No	Yes	Yes	No
Streaming	LiveSports	1.2K	0.8K	1	40	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Streaming	ProactiveVideoQA	1.4K	1.4K	1	49	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Streaming	OmniMMI	2.3K	1.1K	1	100	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Streaming	MMDuet	2.0K	2.0K	1	100	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Streaming	ESTP-Bench	2.3K	1.2K	1	80	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Streaming	PhoStream	5.6K	0.6K	1	92	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Multi-Stream	X-Stream (Ours)	4.2K	0.9K	2-5	160	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Data Construction and Multiplexing

Dual-Verification Pipeline

Preprocessing: resample raw videos to 2 FPS and split them into chunks under storage and transmission limits.
QA generation: combine MLLM generation, curated templates, and Gemini-3-Pro refinement with timestamps and rationales.
Multi-stream sufficiency: keep only questions answerable from the complete synchronized clip.
Multi-stream necessity: reject samples that can be answered from isolated single streams.
Human verification: 31 expert annotators perform two rounds of review, correction, and filtering.

MLLMs as Naive Multiplexers

Since MLLMs can process one token stream at a time, X-Stream studies ways to integrate multiple video streams under a fixed average video token rate, Cmax = 250 tokens per video second.

Spatial Division: stitch concurrent frames into a single visual input.

Time Division: interleave streams while preserving temporal alignment and stream identifiers.

Semantic Division: retain salient tokens before interleaving, improving scalability for higher stream counts.

Multiplexing strategies — X-Stream studies spatial, time, and semantic division multiplexing as practical ways to combine multiple video streams into one token stream under a fixed token budget.

Experimental Results

X-Stream uses online inference and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. The main comparison uses spatial division multiplexing and reports instant, backward, forward, comprehensive, timing, and multi-stream ability scores.

Main Streaming Performance

Model	Overall	Instant	Backward	Forward	Compre.	ER down	NR down	Single Stream	Multi Coop.	Cross Ref.	Cross Inter.
Human (video, audio)	91.84	91.73	95.19	85.10	97.50	9.50	2.55	94.12	92.05	90.10	98.55
Proprietary Multimodal Models
Gemini 3 Pro (video, audio)	49.60	73.38	72.23	20.77	82.04	73.13	0.23	72.45	71.16	74.79	66.96
GPT-5 (video)	27.78	44.28	37.18	6.51	59.83	81.73	1.14	39.08	44.12	52.75	45.65
GPT-4o (video)	22.46	37.28	32.72	4.05	47.01	87.14	0.74	34.83	34.90	43.77	37.52
Doubao-Seed-1.8 (video)	36.79	55.49	57.18	14.52	59.13	66.19	3.95	47.55	35.69	56.52	60.82
Open-source Multimodal Models
Qwen2.5-VL-7B (video)	25.49	40.02	36.02	8.34	45.28	68.10	11.36	43.80	41.43	42.72	40.01
Qwen2.5-Omni-7B (video, audio)	26.82	41.96	41.17	9.03	45.04	53.19	22.51	38.60	40.80	41.86	44.35
Qwen3-VL-8B (video)	26.78	43.41	33.30	7.53	51.01	78.40	6.50	49.88	43.41	33.30	51.01
Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B (video, audio)	34.28	63.92	53.40	0.61	69.16	98.81	0.27	63.41	55.68	66.08	56.58
Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B (video)	34.19	52.09	38.54	14.46	57.26	73.91	1.18	54.68	57.90	65.98	65.22
Open-source Streaming Models
Dispider (video)	15.44	21.71	19.29	8.09	23.90	55.63	7.26	38.01	21.97	23.65	31.37
VideoLLM-online-8B (video)	8.48	15.00	15.53	0.03	17.67	99.10	0.66	13.15	16.90	10.15	6.70
MMDuet2 (video)	6.79	11.76	10.37	1.44	11.27	31.49	54.11	15.84	14.44	9.16	4.96

Far from human performance

The strongest model reaches 49.60 overall, compared with 91.84 for human experts.

Forward questions bottleneck

Proactive timing is difficult: Gemini 3 Pro reaches 20.77 on forward questions while most models are much lower.

Multiplexing has trade-offs

Spatial, time, and semantic division differ in detail preservation, latency, and high stream-count scalability.

Performance Across 11 Core Tasks

Model	Visual Grd.	Audio Grd.	Temporal Grd.	Object Count.	Saliency Detect.	3D Spa.	Counterfactual	Causal	Common Sense	Anomaly	Decision
Gemini 3 Pro	66.72	64.82	68.93	76.37	63.61	70.82	75.00	41.79	69.35	70.52	44.18
GPT-5	36.68	21.63*	36.64	42.52	53.55	52.28	15.00	37.65	44.77	45.54	28.74
GPT-4o	31.99	22.15*	32.83	36.19	42.14	40.74	40.00	33.33	38.04	37.86	24.53
Doubao-Seed-1.8	49.87	29.91	49.31	52.75	61.13	59.14	85.00	52.45	57.92	54.29	37.10
Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B	53.61	52.15	64.56	64.77	68.61	63.29	90.00	53.14	64.08	60.18	27.14
Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B	64.33	29.83*	54.55	54.68	60.96	60.45	40.00	40.22	50.84	41.25	31.59
Dispider	19.58	13.80*	18.67	25.10	22.50	22.12	50.00	17.20	21.65	17.32	10.94
VideoLLM-online-8B	12.62	17.97*	21.47	12.90	22.64	21.94	0.00	18.14	21.53	21.13	14.44
MMDuet2	22.27	18.35*	22.24	36.10	24.14	23.63	10.00	17.90	22.16	20.42	9.12

Examples

X-Stream case study — Case study with a 4-stream proactive free-form QA and a 2-stream proactive multiple-choice QA.

Resources

X-Stream multi-stream examples — Representative multi-stream examples from the X-Stream release.

Data Source Licenses

Dataset	Type	License
brain4cars	Driving	BSD 2-Clause
Waymo-E2E	Driving	Waymo Dataset License
Apidis-Basketball	Sports	Apidis Academic License
e-Sports (Self-record)	Sports	CC BY-NC 4.0
Split-screen Game (Youtube)	Sports	CC BY-NC 4.0 / YouTube Standard License
DROID	Robot	CC BY 4.0
UAV-VisLoc	Robot	Apache 2.0
EgoExo4D	Daily Routine	Ego4D License
EgoLife	Daily Routine	MIT License
Seamless-interaction	Chat	CC BY-NC 4.0
WILDTRACK	Surveillance	None
All-Day	Surveillance	CC BY-NC 4.0
FaceEngage	Live Streaming	CC BY-NC 4.0 / YouTube Standard License
Streamer-React (Youtube)	Live Streaming	CC BY-NC 4.0 / YouTube Standard License
Map-Street (Baidu/Google Map API)	Interfaces	API Terms of Service
Comma2K-19 w/. dashboard	Interfaces	MIT License

Dataset

HuggingFace release for X-Stream data.

Code

Evaluation code and benchmark tooling.

Project Website

Public project page and updates.

BibTeX

@article{sun2026x,
  title={X-Stream: Exploring MLLMs as Multiplexers for Multi-Stream Understanding},
  author={Sun, Peiwen and Lu, Xudong and Liu, Huadai and Bo, Yang and Wu, Dongming and Guan, Huankang and Cai, Minghong and Chen, Jinpeng and Guo, Xintong and Li, Shuhan and others},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.02482},
  year={2026}
}
    }