@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://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/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/)."
}