The paper introduces the character naming task, where a model must identify which visible character in a film bears a name mentioned in dialogue, using only the movie’s video and dialogue without external cast lists or actor photos. It highlights the difficulty of name resolution due to cinematic cues such as shot-reverse-shot structure, self-introduction, direct address, third-party reference, gaze, and temporal continuity. The authors provide a dataset and annotations, develop a video-and-dialogue model, compare it with large multimodal language models, and propose a progressive framework for building a character bank as the film unfolds.
arXiv:2607. 02504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-form TV dramas present a formidable challenge for comprehensive video understanding, where deciphering complex storyline often relies on \textbf{speaker recognition}, the task of accurately attributing each spoken utterance to its respective character.
arXiv:2610.10163v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linking people's appearance and actions to character identities is essential for understanding video narratives. We present a framework for identity-aw...
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.
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: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...
The paper introduces MObyGaze, a dataset of 20 films annotated by experts for multimodal objectification, covering 6072 segments across 43 hours of video. It defines objectification through a structured thesaurus of 5 sub‑constructs and 11 concepts spanning visual, speech, and audio modalities. The authors formulate learning tasks, explore label diversity strategies, and benchmark vision, text, and audio models to demonstrate the task’s feasibility.
arXiv:2609.14118v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Online understanding of who is talking to the camera wearer is a key capability for egocentric social interaction. However, existing talk-to-me (TTM)...
arXiv:2608.21430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal language models increasingly show promise for enabling the large-scale computational analysis of film, opening up new avenues for learning a...
arXiv:2609.38683v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cinematic camera motion is a fundamental storytelling tool, defined not only by where the camera is positioned in the scene, but also by how it moves...
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 24636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cinematographic captioning aims to describe how a video is filmed using professional film-language concepts such as camera movement, shot size, depth of field, composition, and shooting angle.