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
Audio Description (AD) provides spoken narration of visual events during dialogue gaps, making movies accessible to visually impaired audiences. The problem requires determining both what (which visua...
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.
By Seung Hyun Hahm, Minh T. Dinh, SouYoung Jin
arXiv:2604. 25220v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data videos combine animated visualizations with synchronized narration to communicate quantitative information and are widely used in journalism, education, and public communication.
By Ridwan Mahbub, Syem Aziz, Mizanur Rahman, Mahir Ahmed, Shadikur Rahman, Shafiq Joty, Enamul Hoque
Narrating the visual component of movies is known as audio description. It is a narrative technique designed to enable blind and visually impaired individuals to follow the story.
The paper introduces Temporal Context Routing (TCR), a method that aligns script timing with the shared temporal axis used for audio and video generation. By routing prompt guidance to specific temporal positions in both modalities, TCR dramatically improves shot boundary accuracy and dialogue timing on a set of test scripts, while preserving visual quality and audio‑visual sync. A user study confirms that participants prefer TCR across multiple evaluation dimensions.
By Yichen Liu, Quanwei Zhang, Haozhe Wang, Donghao Zhou, Xiaojie Li, Yang Shi, Jiaming Liu, Ruihua Huang, Yingtian Zou, Daquan Zhou
The paper introduces Temporally-Grounded Language Generation (TGLG), a benchmark that tests vision‑language models on their ability to produce semantically accurate and temporally precise utterances in real‑time settings. It identifies perceptual updating and contingency awareness as key capabilities, curates datasets from sports broadcasting and egocentric interactions, and proposes the TRACE metric to jointly evaluate semantic similarity and temporal alignment. The authors also present VLM‑TSI, a model that interleaves visual and linguistic tokens in a time‑synchronized manner, achieving better performance than a strong baseline yet still showing modest overall results, underscoring the challenge of real‑time VLMs.
By Keunwoo Peter Yu, Joyce Chai
arXiv:2608.28699v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Understanding long-form video remains a fundamental challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Sparse frame sampling fails to capture fine...
By Dong-Hee Kim, Seonwoo Choi, Changbeen Kim, Jungmyung Wi, Juyeon Ko, Youngju Choi, Il Hyeon Mun, Hyunwoo J. Kim, Donghyun Kim
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
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:2606. 09846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual art remains largely inaccessible to blind and low-vision (BLV) audiences due to brief or absent alt-text, which rarely conveys the sensory, spatial, or emotional qualities of an artwork.
By Vignesh Nagarajan
arXiv:2606. 01031v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio-driven talking-head generation has advanced rapidly, yet existing evaluation protocols mainly rely on frame-wise metrics that assume strict temporal correspondence between generated and reference videos.
By Zhicheng Zhang, Lei Wang, Yu Zhang, Yongsheng Gao