arXiv Machine Learning

ThetreStageAI: Multi-View Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Structured Bengali Theatre Production Planning

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

What, When, and How: Audio Description as Constrained Global Optimization

The paper presents a new approach to automatic audio description (AD) that treats the task as a constrained global optimization problem. It jointly decides what visual content is narratively important, when it can be spoken without overlapping dialogue, and how to phrase it within time limits. Using large language models for salience estimation and a mixed‑integer linear program for scheduling, the system outperforms prior methods on the REFRAMED benchmark, especially in temporal placement and narrative relevance.

By Igor Sterner, Mirella Lapata, Alex Lascarides, Frank Keller
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

CinematicVQA: Benchmarking Film-Grammar Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models

CinematicVQA is a new benchmark for evaluating large vision‑language models on film‑grammar reasoning. It introduces the Cinematic Scene Graph, a structured representation linking filming techniques to perceptual effects and narrative functions, and tests models on tasks beyond low‑level technique recognition. The study finds a semantic gap where models excel at describing visuals but struggle to identify underlying techniques, and shows that fine‑tuning improves performance on narrative function and multi‑hop reasoning.

By Shuo Xing, Pooja Verlani, Balu Adsumilli, Zhengzhong Tu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Long Story Short: Story-level Video Understanding from 20K Short Films

The paper introduces Short‑Films 20K (SF20K), a large publicly available movie dataset comprising 20,143 amateur films totaling 3,582 hours, with an average length of 12 minutes per film. Accompanying the dataset is SF20K‑Test, a manual open‑ended question‑answering benchmark featuring 95 movies and 979 question‑answer pairs. Analysis of the benchmark shows limited data leakage, highlights the necessity of long‑term reasoning, and demonstrates that instruction tuning on the large‑scale dataset significantly boosts vision‑language model performance.

By Ridouane Ghermi, Xi Wang, Vicky Kalogeiton, Ivan Laptev
arXiv AI
Sep 16

Text-Driven Artistic Staging: 3D Posing, Lighting, and Camera References from Paintings

The paper presents a method for generating 3D staging—human poses, lighting, and camera setup—directly from affective textual descriptions. It builds a dataset of 11,911 text–staging pairs derived from 2,328 figurative paintings, reconstructing SMPL bodies, estimating illumination, and recovering camera parameters. A flow‑matching transformer is trained to produce variable‑size scenes and multiple staging alternatives, achieving a 32.2% retrieval R@1 on held‑out prompts, outperforming a CLIP‑based baseline.

By Yunge Wen