CoVStream: Edge-Cloud Collaboration for Understanding of Long Video Streams

Long, continuous video streams are an increasingly critical driver of multimedia intelligence. Existing efforts often handle long videos with a sample-encode-reason approach using large models. However, they overlook a crucial deployment fact: the stream is often produced by computationally constrained devices. This forces an untenable compromise: cloud offloading unlocks strong reasoning but incurs prohibitive bandwidth overhead, while on-device processing remains limited by edge hardware capacity. Therefore, we propose CoVStream, the first edge-cloud collaborative framework for understanding long video streams. The edge node distills raw video streams into compact visual features and semantic captions for transmission to the cloud, minimizing bandwidth costs, while the cloud server integrates this data into an entity graph and global visual context, activating the heavy reasoning model only when a user query arrives. Experiments on VideoMME-Long, LVBench, and RTV-Bench show that CoVStream reduces bandwidth usage by 87.6% while retaining 99.2% of the cloud baseline accuracy on LVBench.