StreamVibe: Proactive Video Agents for Evolving User Intent

Abstract

Vision-language models are shifting from offline passive understanding toward online proactive interaction. However, prevailing methods largely rely on explicit requests while overlooking implicit user intents (e.g., "where should I click next?" when a user is navigating a website) and fail to continuously update their understanding as user intents evolve. These limitations make them less suitable for intent-aware interaction in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce StreamVibe-Bench, a new benchmark that serves as a testbed for user intent understanding and interaction, comprising 4.1K evaluation samples and 85K training samples spanning explicit, implicit, and dynamic intents. Building on this benchmark, we develop StreamVibe-VL, a streaming proactive model that infers implicit user intents from continuous observations and dynamically adapts its interactions as these intents evolve. We further introduce StreamVibe-Harness, which maintains user intents as persistent states with flexible lifecycles through hierarchical memory, enabling it to track the latest user intents and environmental states. Our experiments reveal three key findings: (i) StreamVibe-VL preserves strong general video understanding capabilities while improving response timing and answer quality by 10.7% over existing baselines; (ii) existing proactive models remain limited in understanding user intents and determining when to respond, especially under implicit and dynamic intents; and (iii) StreamVibe-Harness further improves response consistency and adaptation during sustained interactions, resulting in a 12.3% gain in proactive interaction performance.