@inproceedings{xueyun-etal-2026-roma,
title = "{ROMA}: Real-time Omni-Multimodal Assistant with Interactive Streaming Understanding",
author = "Xueyun, Tian and
Li, Wei and
Xu, Bingbing and
Dong, Heng and
Wang, Yuanzhuo and
Shen, Huawei",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1153/",
pages = "23018--23039",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
abstract = "Recent Omni-multimodal Large Language Models show promise in unified audio, vision, and text modeling. However, streaming audio-video understanding remains challenging, as existing approaches suffer from disjointed capabilities: they typically exhibit incomplete modality support or lack autonomous proactive monitoring. To address this, we present ROMA, **a real-time omni-multimodal assistant for unified reactive and proactive interaction**. ROMA processes continuous inputs as synchronized multimodal units, aligning dense audio with discrete video frames to handle granularity mismatches. For online decision-making, we introduce a lightweight *speak head* that decouples response initiation from generation to ensure precise triggering without task conflict. We train ROMA with a curated streaming dataset and a two-stage curriculum that progressively optimizes for streaming format adaptation and proactive responsiveness. To standardize the fragmented evaluation landscape, we reorganize diverse benchmarks into a unified suite covering both proactive (alert, narration) and reactive (QA) settings. Extensive experiments across 12 benchmarks demonstrate ROMA achieves state-of-the-art performance on proactive tasks while competitive in reactive settings, validating its robustness in unified real-time omni-multimodal understanding. Code and benchmark are available [here](https://eureka-maggie.github.io/ROMA{\_}show/)."
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<abstract>Recent Omni-multimodal Large Language Models show promise in unified audio, vision, and text modeling. However, streaming audio-video understanding remains challenging, as existing approaches suffer from disjointed capabilities: they typically exhibit incomplete modality support or lack autonomous proactive monitoring. To address this, we present ROMA, **a real-time omni-multimodal assistant for unified reactive and proactive interaction**. ROMA processes continuous inputs as synchronized multimodal units, aligning dense audio with discrete video frames to handle granularity mismatches. For online decision-making, we introduce a lightweight *speak head* that decouples response initiation from generation to ensure precise triggering without task conflict. We train ROMA with a curated streaming dataset and a two-stage curriculum that progressively optimizes for streaming format adaptation and proactive responsiveness. To standardize the fragmented evaluation landscape, we reorganize diverse benchmarks into a unified suite covering both proactive (alert, narration) and reactive (QA) settings. Extensive experiments across 12 benchmarks demonstrate ROMA achieves state-of-the-art performance on proactive tasks while competitive in reactive settings, validating its robustness in unified real-time omni-multimodal understanding. Code and benchmark are available [here](https://eureka-maggie.github.io/ROMA_show/).</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T ROMA: Real-time Omni-Multimodal Assistant with Interactive Streaming Understanding
%A Xueyun, Tian
%A Li, Wei
%A Xu, Bingbing
%A Dong, Heng
%A Wang, Yuanzhuo
%A Shen, Huawei
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-395-1
%F xueyun-etal-2026-roma
%X Recent Omni-multimodal Large Language Models show promise in unified audio, vision, and text modeling. However, streaming audio-video understanding remains challenging, as existing approaches suffer from disjointed capabilities: they typically exhibit incomplete modality support or lack autonomous proactive monitoring. To address this, we present ROMA, **a real-time omni-multimodal assistant for unified reactive and proactive interaction**. ROMA processes continuous inputs as synchronized multimodal units, aligning dense audio with discrete video frames to handle granularity mismatches. For online decision-making, we introduce a lightweight *speak head* that decouples response initiation from generation to ensure precise triggering without task conflict. We train ROMA with a curated streaming dataset and a two-stage curriculum that progressively optimizes for streaming format adaptation and proactive responsiveness. To standardize the fragmented evaluation landscape, we reorganize diverse benchmarks into a unified suite covering both proactive (alert, narration) and reactive (QA) settings. Extensive experiments across 12 benchmarks demonstrate ROMA achieves state-of-the-art performance on proactive tasks while competitive in reactive settings, validating its robustness in unified real-time omni-multimodal understanding. Code and benchmark are available [here](https://eureka-maggie.github.io/ROMA_show/).
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1153/
%P 23018-23039
Markdown (Informal)
[ROMA: Real-time Omni-Multimodal Assistant with Interactive Streaming Understanding](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1153/) (Xueyun et al., Findings 2026)
ACL