real-time

Definition

Fast enough to keep up with the input as it arrives — the system meets a deadline rather than merely being quick. In video and robotics the budget is per frame, so a real-time claim only means something alongside the hardware it was measured on. Papers often trade accuracy for latency deliberately; the informative result is where that curve sits, not the label.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: VoiceMem — A Left Brain and a Right Brain for Voice Agents, at Zero Added LatencyVoiceMem: Streaming Dual-Brain Memory for Real-Time Interaction
• Paper Walkthrough: TurboVLA — Kick the LLM Out of the Loop and Run a Robot Policy at 32 Hz on an RTX 4090 with Under 1 GB of VRAMTurboVLA: Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Model at 32 Hz on an RTX 4090 with <1 GB VRAM
• Paper Explained: JoyAI-Video-Edit — Autoregressive Diffusion That Keeps Editing 720p Video at ~30 FPS, Without Ever Seeing the FutureJoyAI-Video-Edit: Real-Time Open-Ended Video Editing with Autoregressive Diffusion