arXiv AI

StoryTeller: Training-Free Narrative Grounding for Long-Form Audio Description

arXiv:2607. 11798v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-form audio description (AD) requires more than describing visible actions: it must preserve characters, events, relationships, and story context across scenes so that blind and low-vision (BLV) audiences can follow a film.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

From Visual Cues to Spoken Narration: Rethinking Audio Description

The paper introduces Cue2Narrate, a two‑stage pipeline that jointly predicts what visual events to narrate and when to insert the narration in long, untrimmed movie clips. It uses a dual‑head audio‑visual localizer to identify visual cue and narration windows, followed by a LoRA‑adapted vision‑language model that generates concise audio descriptions, trained with a Description Ranking Loss. The authors also present the LongLSMDC benchmark, comprising up to 8‑minute clips, and show that Cue2Narrate outperforms video‑only and audio‑only baselines by 5–12 points in average mAP and improves AD generation over fine‑tuned base VLMs.

By Akshita Gupta, Aditya Arora, Federico Tombari, Marcus Rohrbach, Anna Rohrbach
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 Computer Vision
Sep 16

Video-HolmesV2: Can MLLMs Reason with Spatio-Temporal Audio-Visual Evidence in Long Videos?

Video-HolmesV2 is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models on their ability to reason with spatio‑temporal audio‑visual evidence in long videos. It requires models to justify answers with precise evidence, uses a multi‑model cross‑verification pipeline and a spatio‑temporal evidence‑aware metric, and introduces an audio‑text guided token compression framework to reduce long‑context noise. In evaluations, even strong proprietary models score below 60% while the proposed approach outperforms comparable open‑source omni‑models.

By Zhaoyang Wei, Zipeng Wang, Yushe Cao, Chenhui Qiang, Shuaibing Cheng, Xuesong Yang, Sen Nie, Bowen Jiang, Wenchao Ding, Yanchao Hao, Zheng Wei, Xuehui Yu, Zhenjun Han
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 AI
Sep 21

VidOmni-Bench: A Benchmark for Fine-Grained Video Understanding via Spatio-Temporal Event Verification across Complexity and Duration

VidOmni-Bench is a new benchmark for fine‑grained video understanding that asks models to verify whether each event in dense video captions is supported by the video. It contains 500 videos covering five complexity types and durations from 4 seconds to 90 minutes, and uses human‑verified sentence‑level labels to create hard negatives. Experiments show that Video‑LLMs often hallucinate events, struggle to detect incorrect descriptions, and exhibit varying weaknesses depending on video complexity and duration.

By Changbeen Kim, Junwon Chang, Kipyo Kim, Risa Shinoda, Kuniaki Saito, Donghyun Kim
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