StreamAhead adjusts video processing before questions arrive

How can a video question-answering system keep processing a live stream at its required rate and still answer quickly when it cannot know when a question will arrive? Doing more work early can make answers quicker, but may leave incoming video waiting; delaying work risks making the answer slow.

StreamAhead lets each video segment progress as resources allow, then finishes retrieved segments at question time to balance stream rate and answer delay.

StreamAhead stores each video segment after different amounts of processing, then reuses its most complete stored result and finishes only what retrieved segments still need.

Its scheduler profiles those costs, prioritizes question work when a question arrives, and uses spare CPU and GPU capacity for more preparation.

The authors report answer accuracy on video-question tests and, in a replay rate sweep, processing at 30 frames per second while keeping the 95th-percentile wait from question arrival to the first generated token below 0.5 seconds.

This supports adjusting the amount of work done ahead of time to balance incoming video and answer delay.

The evidence comes from the tested workloads and configurations. Segments are encoded independently, which limits how much they can interact; the system tests used one GPU, repeated source frames when processing rates exceeded the source frame rate, and profiles that assume a stable workload.