ROMA: Real-time Omni-Multimodal Assistant with Interactive Streaming Understanding

Tian Xueyun, Wei Li, Bingbing Xu, Heng Dong, Yuanzhuo Wang, Huawei Shen


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/).
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.1153
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
23018–23039
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1153/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tian Xueyun, Wei Li, Bingbing Xu, Heng Dong, Yuanzhuo Wang, and Huawei Shen. 2026. ROMA: Real-time Omni-Multimodal Assistant with Interactive Streaming Understanding. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 23018–23039, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ROMA: Real-time Omni-Multimodal Assistant with Interactive Streaming Understanding (Xueyun et al., Findings 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1153.pdf
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